* 


tibravy  of  Che  Cheoicvgicai  gvminary 

PRINCETON  •  NEW  JERSEY 


BV  4915  .J3 

Jackson,  George,  1864-1945 

The  fact  of  conversion 


?*Pp^M       fM 


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The    Cole    Lectures  for    ipoS 
delivered  before  Vanderbilt  University 

The    Fact   of  Conversion 


By 
GEORGE  JACKSON,  B.A. 


New  York         Chicago         Toronto 
Fleming  H.   Revell    Company 

London        and        Edinburgh 


Copyright,  1908,  by 
FLEMING  H.  REVELL  COMPANY 


OS* 


New  York:  158  Fifth  Avenue 
Chicago:  80  Wabash  Avenue 
Toronto:  25  Richmond  Street,  W. 
London:  21  Paternoster  Square 
Edinburgh:      100    Princes    Street 


To 

The  Members  of 

The  Theological  Faculty 

Vanderbilt  University 

whose  generous  confidence  invited 
and  ivhose  sympathy  encouraged 
the     delivery    of  these     lectures 


THE  COLE  LECTURES 

THE  late  Colonel  E.  W.  Cole  of  Nashville,  Ten- 
nessee, donated  to  Vanderbilt  University  the  sum 
of  five  thousand  dollars,  afterwards  increased  by 
Mrs.  E.  W.  Cole  to  ten  thousand,  the  design  and  con- 
ditions of  which  gift  are  stated  as  follows  : 

"  The  object  of  this  fund  is  to  establish  a  foundation 
for  a  perpetual  Lectureship  in  connection  with  the  Bib- 
lical Department  of  the  University,  to  be  restricted  in  its 
scope  to  a  defense  and  advocacy  of  the  Christian  re- 
ligion. The  lectures  shall  be  delivered  at  such  inter- 
vals, from  time  to  time,  as  shall  be  deemed  best  by  the 
Board  of  Trust ;  and  the  particular  theme  and  lecturer 
shall  be  determined  by  nomination  of  the  Theological 
Faculty  and  confirmation  of  the  College  of  Bishops  of 
the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church,  South.  Said  lecture 
shall  always  be  reduced  to  writing  in  full,  and  the  man- 
uscript of  the  same  shall  be  the  property  of  the  Univer- 
sity, to  be  published  or  disposed  of  by  the  Board  of 
Trust  at  its  discretion,  the  net  proceeds  arising  there- 
from to  be  added  to  the  foundation  fund,  or  otherwise 
used  for  the  benefit  of  the  Biblical  Department." 


Preface 

THE  six  lectures  contained  in  this 
volume  were  delivered,  in  the  spring 
of  this  year,  at  Vanderbilt  University, 
in  response  to  the  invitation  of  the  Theological 
Faculty.  In  sending  them  forth  to  a  larger 
public,  it  is  unnecessary  to  add  more  than  a 
brief  word  of  introduction. 

The  book  is  addressed  primarily  to  those 
who,  like  myself,  are  engaged  in  the  practical 
work  of  the  Christian  Church.  I  have  done 
my  best  to  become  acquainted  with  the 
relevant  literature  on  the  subject,  but  the 
book  remains  still  the  message  of  a  busy  city 
pastor  rather  than  the  scientific  treatise  of  a 
professional  student. 

The  point  of  view  from  which  the  whole 
discussion  proceeds  can  be  stated  very  simply. 
With  all  my  heart  I  believe  that,  as  the  author 
of  Ecce  Homo  says,  the  article  of  Conversion 
is  the  true  artictdus  stantis  aut  cadentis 
9 


IO  PREFACE 

ecclesice.  But  in  theology  we  retain  nothing 
that  we  cannot  re-interpret.  "  We  are  not 
done  with  Conversion,"  says  a  writer  in  The 
Expository  Times,  whose  words  appeared 
after  these  Lectures  were  completed ;  "  we 
never  shall  be  done  with  it.  But  we  must 
tell  our  own  generation  what  Conversion 
means."  That  is  what  this  little  book  seeks 
to  do. 

Some  readers  may  be  disposed  to  complain 
of  the  frequency  and  length  of  the  biograph- 
ical illustrations  of  which  I  have  made  use. 
I  cannot  apologize  for  them ;  they  were 
essential  to  my  purpose.  Facts  and  an  in- 
terpretation are  all  that  the  book  contains, 
all  that  it  was  ever  designed  to  contain. 

It  only  remains  for  me  to  acknowledge  my 
indebtedness  to  my  friend  and  former  col- 
league, the  Rev.  E.  J.  Ives  (of  Bristol, 
England),  who  has  assisted  me  with  many 
valuable  suggestions,  and  to  my  wife,  who 
has  been  in  this,  as  in  all  my  public  work, 
my  unfailing  helpmeet  and   adviser. 

George  Jackson. 

Toronto,  igo8. 


Contents 

I.  The  Reality  of  Conversion 

As   a  Fact  of  Conscious- 
ness         13 

II.  The  Reality  of  Conversion 

As  a  Fact  for  Life  .      55 

III.  Varieties  of  Conversion       .      95 

IV.  The   Rationale  of  Conver- 

sion       ...  .131 

V.  The  Psychology  of  Conver- 

sion .       .       .       .167 

VI.  Present  Day  Preaching  and 

Conversion    .       .       .       ,199 


LECTURE  I 

THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 
AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS 


LECTURE  I 

THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 
AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS 

"^CHRISTIANITY,"  wrote  Henry 
I  .  Drummond,  now  more  than  twenty 
years  ago,1  "is  learning  from 
science  to  go  back  to  its  facts.  There  is, 
however,"  he  went  on,  "  one  portion  of  this 
field  of  facts  which  is  still  strangely 
neglected,  and  to  which  a  scientific  theology 
may  turn  its  next  attention.  The  evidence 
for  Christianity  is  not  the  Evidences.  'The 
evidence  for  Christianity  is  a  Christian.l  The 
unit  of  physics  is  the  atom,  of  biology  the 
cell,  of  philosophy  the  man,  of  theology  the 
Christian.  The  natural  man,  his  regenera- 
tion by  the  Holy  Spirit,  the  spiritual  man  and 
his  relations  to  the  world  and  to  God,  these 
are  the  modern  facts  for  a  scientific  theology. 

1  In  an  essay  entitled  "  The  Contribution  of  Science  to  Chris- 
tianity," Expositor,  third  series,  Vol.  I. 

J5 


l6  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

We  may  indeed  talk  with  science  on  its  own 
terms  about  the  creation  of  the  world,  and 
the  spirituality  of  nature,  and  the  force  be- 
hind nature,  and  the  unseen  universe  ;  but 
our  language  is  not  less  scientific,  not  less 
justified  by  fact,  when  we  speak  of  the  work 
of  the  risen  Christ  and  the  contemporary 
activities  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and  the  facts  of 
regeneration,  and  the  powers  which  are  free- 
ing men  from  sin.  There  is  a  great  experi- 
ment which  is  repeated  every  day,  the  evi- 
dence for  which  is  as  accessible  as  for  any 
fact  of  science ;  its  phenomena  are  as  pal- 
pable as  any  in  nature,  its  processes  are  as 
explicable,  or  as  inexplicable  ;  its  purpose  is 
as  clear ;  and  yet  science  has  never  been 
seriously  asked  to  reckon  with  it,  nor  has 
theology  ever  granted  it  the  place  its  im- 
pressive reality  commands.  One  aim  of  a 
scientific  theology  will  be  to  study  conversion, 
and  restore  to  Christianity  its  most  powerful 
witness." 

I  know  no  words  with  which  more  fitly  to 
introduce  the  subject  of  this  brief  course  of 
lectures.     It  is  not — in  the  sense  at  least  in 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         1 7 

which  the  term  is  commonly  employed — a 
theological  discussion  on  which  we  are  about 
to  enter,  but  an  inquiry  into  certain  indubi- 
table facts  of  the  religious  life.  It  may  be 
true,  as  we  are  repeatedly  told,  that  men 
to-day  do  not  care  for  theology ;  but,  how- 
ever impatient  it  may  be  of  dogma,  an  age 
which  boasts  of  its  hunger  and  thirst  after 
fact  will  surely  not  refuse  a  hearing  to  the 
facts  of  the  religious  consciousness. 

It  is,  I  hope,  possible  to  enter  on  an  inquiry 
of  this  nature  without  exposing  oneself  to  un- 
pleasant suspicions.  I  shall  have  much  to 
say  throughout  these  lectures  about  conver- 
sion experiences,  but  I  must  not  therefore  be 
understood  as  claiming  for  those  Churches 
which  are  wont  to  lay  greater  emphasis  on 
such  experiences  a  higher  rank  than  others  in 
the  spiritual  order  ;  it  is  the  reality  of  the  ex- 
periences themselves  which  is  our  present 
sole  concern.  And  if  sometimes  I  seem  to 
some  to  speak  rather  the  dialect  of  a  prov- 
ince than  the  common  speech  of  the  king- 
dom, I  can  but  reply  that  this  dialect,  if  such 
it  be,  is  the  spiritual  mother  tongue  of  multi- 


18  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

tudes  who  daily  speak  in  it  the  mighty  works 
of  God.  Neither  must  anything  in  these  lec- 
tures be  construed  as  putting  forward  in  be- 
half of  one  type  of  experience  a  claim  to 
spiritual  validity  and  worth  which  is  denied 
to  others  which  do  not  readily  conform  to  it. 
Our  single  aim  will  be  to  do  justice  to  an  im- 
mense group  of  spiritual  phenomena  which 
are  among  the  most  real  things  in  Christian 
history  or  human  experience. 

Let  us  begin,  then,  with  an  honest  attempt 
to  gain  an  adequate  impression  of  the  range 
and  reality  of  the  phenomena  under  consid- 
eration. For  some  of  us,  it  may  be,  this  will 
be  no  easy  task.  The  subject  belongs  to  a 
realm  in  which  our  minds  do  not  move 
freely,  in  which  we  feel  ourselves  aliens,  un- 
sympathetic and  it  may  be  antagonistic. 
When  we  hear  of  conversions  we  think  im- 
mediately of  revivals  and  the  clatter  of  a 
machinery  which  always  jars  upon  our 
nerves ;  to  us  revivalism  is  but  another  name 
for  hysteria  and  unwholesome  excitement. 
And  even  the  literature  of  spiritual  autobi- 
ography— the  most  indispensable  of  all  data 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS  19 

for  a  subject  such  as  this, — is  to  some  of  us 
utterly  distasteful.  We  shrink  from  these  soul 
anatomies  as  we  shrink  from  the  revelations 
of  the  scalpel  and  the  dissecting-room.  I  do 
not  stay  to  discuss  the  reasonableness  or 
otherwise  of  this  attitude  of  mind  ;  I  only 
wish  to  point  out  that  so  long  as  we  persist 
in  it  we  put  ourselves  out  of  court  in  an  in- 
quiry like  the  present.  "  The  first  thing  to 
bear  in  mind,"  as  Prof.  James  bluntly  puts 
it,  "  is  that  nothing  can  be  more  stupid 
than  to  bar  out  phenomena  from  our  notice, 
merely  because  we  are  incapable  of  taking 
part  in  anything  like  them  ourselves."  '  The 
religious  inquirer,  like  the  scientific  inquirer, 
must  lay  aside  his  prejudices ;  he  must, 
as  Prof.  Huxley  once  said,  sit  down  before 
fact  as  a  little  child,  prepared  to  give  up 
every  preconceived  notion  and  follow 
humbly  wherever  it  may  lead  him. 

The  fact  of  conversion  may  be  studied  in 
two  different  ways :  in  itself,  or  in  its  practical 
results ;  as  a  fact  of  consciousness,  or  as  a 
fact  for  life.     Reserving  for  the  following  lec- 

1  Varieties  of Religious  Experience,  p.  109. 


20  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

ture  what  has  to  be  said  concerning  the  fruits 
of  conversion  it  will  be  our  aim  now  to  bring 
together  some  of  the  testimonies  to  the 
reality  of  conversion  as  these  are  written  in 
the  records  of  the  religious  consciousness. 

I 
And  at  once  there  opens  before  us  a  field 
of  vast  and  varied  interest.  How  vast  and 
varied  the  field  is  perhaps  no  one  realizes 
who  has  not  made  some  attempt  to  survey 
and  map  it  out.  Most  people  know  some- 
thing of  the  great  spiritual  transformations 
associated  with  the  names  of  St.  Paul  and  St. 
Augustine,  of  John  Bunyan  and  John  Wesley ; 
but  how  many  of  us  have  made  any  effort 
seriously  to  estimate  the  significance  of  that 
great  mass  of  veritable  human  documents  to 
be  found  in  the  New  Testament,  in  the  rec- 
ords of  great  religious  awakenings  like  that 
in  America  under  Jonathan  Edwards,  or  that 
in  England  under  Wesley  and  Whitefield, 
and  above  all  in  the  biographies  and  auto- 
biographies, the  hymns  and  prayers  and  con- 
fessions, of  religious  men  and  women  of  all 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS  21 

Churches  and  in  all  ages?  Whatever  else 
may  be  said  about  Prof.  James's  much  dis- 
cussed Gifford  Lectures,  they  had  at  least 
this  merit,  that  by  the  concrete  examples 
with  which  they  were  so  liberally  loaded  they 
gave  to  many  readers  a  new  sense  of  the  ex- 
tent and  reality  of  the  world  of  religious  ex- 
perience. This  is  the  world  which  we  now 
seek  to  enter.  It  is  for  us  to  observe,  to  col- 
lect, to  group,  to  interpret  whatever  facts  are 
available  for  our  purpose.  Is  there  testimony 
adequate  to  establish  the  reality  of  those 
various  experiences — deliverance  from  the 
sense  of  guilt,  deliverance  from  the  power  of 
evil  habit,  the  joyful  assurance  of  the  favour 
of  God — which  are  included  within  the  term 
conversion  ?  The  answer  may  be  given  for 
convenience  sake  in  fourfold  form. 

(i)  We  turn  first  to  the  New  Testament 
and  to  the  conversion  of  St.  Paul.  There  is 
no  necessity  to  speculate  about  the  mecha- 
nism of  this  great  experience.  /As  Principal 
Rainy  says,1  it  is  vain  for  us  to  inquire  by 

1  Lecture  on  St.  Paul  in  The  Evangelical  Succession,  Vol.  I, 
p.  18. 


22  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

what  means  the  form  of  Christ  and  the  words 
of  Christ  reached  the  consciousness  of  Paul^ 
One  thing  is  plain  :  Paul  saw  the  Lord,  he 
heard  the  Lord,  he  spoke  with  the  Lord ; 
through  all  his  after  life  his  certainty  of  these 
things  never  wavered  ;  and  behind  this  it  is 
not  possible  for  us  to  go.  But,  whatever  may 
be  our  explanation,  the  experience  itself  re- 
mains, and  its  profound  significance  both  for 
the  Apostle  and  the  world.  We  may  say  if 
we  choose,  with  Matthew  Arnold,  that 
"  Paul's  conversion  is  for  science  an  event  of 
precisely  the  same  nature  as  the  conversions 
of  which  the  history  of  Methodism  relates  so 
many  ; "  1  but  surely  Paul's  conversion  has 
also  "for  science"  this  further  significance 
that,  next  to  the  Death  and  Resurrection  of 
our  Lord,  it  is  the  most  momentous  event  in 
Christian  history.  How  the  Apostle  himself 
thought  of  it  his  own  writings  make  abun- 
dantly plain.  //  was  the  good  pleasure  of  God 
to  reveal  His  Son  in  me  ;  thus  and  thus  only 
did  Paul  the  persecutor  become  Paul  the 
Apostle.     /  was  before  a  blasphemer^  and  a 

1  St.  Paul  and  Protestantism,  p.  36. 


AS  A   FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         23 

persecutor,  and  injurious  ;  howbeit  I  obtained 
mercy  :  this  is  the  testimony  in  every  epistle. 
That  which  happened  to  St.  Paul  on  the  road 
to  Damascus  was  no  mere  incident  in  the  de- 
velopment of  his  spiritual  experience  ;  it  was 
a  rending  revolution  which  made  all  things 
new,  the  origin  and  explanation  of  all  that 
followed  it 

Nor  is  St.  Paul  our  only  New  Testament 
witness  to  the  reality  of  conversion.  I  shall 
have  occasion  in  a  later  lecture  to  speak  of 
the  varieties  of  religious  experience  which 
are  revealed  in  the  earliest  manifestations  of 
Christian  life  ;  but,  striking  and  instructive  as 
these  varieties  are,  there  is  underlying  them 
all  a  unity  of  consciousness  which  is  one  of 
the  most  impressive  things  in  the  literature 
of  the  New  Testament.  Open  the  apostolic 
writings  where  we  will,  we  find  ourselves 
everywhere  in  the  presence  of  a  life  thrilling 
through  its  every  fibre  with  the  joy  of  a  great 
deliverance ;  bearing  itself  proudly  yet 
humbly,  because  conscious  of  strange  new 
powers,  its  own,  yet  not  its  own,  but  An- 
other's ;  uttering  itself  too  in  speech  that,  like 


24  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

itself,  was  new  and  strange,  and  yet  withal, 
too  feeble  for  the  task  committed  to  it  The 
new  life  did  not  come  to  all  who  believed  in 
Christ  in  the  same  way,  but  to  all  it  came, 
and  when  it  came,  so  poor  and  mean  in  its 
presence  did  all  other  distinctions  seem,  that 
they  who  received  it  were  as  brethren. 

There  is,  perhaps,  no  truer  index  of  the 
depth  and  strength  of  the  New  Testament 
consciousness  of  salvation  than  is  to  be  found 
in  the  rich  and  varied  phraseology  through 
which  it  seeks  expression.  If  any  man  is  in 
Christ — so  do  all  the  Apostles  bear  witness — 
for  him  all  life  is  become  nobly  new.  The 
soul  passes  into  a  new  kingdom,  and  owes 
allegiance  to  a  new  lord  ;  it  is  delivered  out  of 
the  power  of  darkness  and  translated  into  the 
kingdom  of  the  Son  of  God's  love ;  it  is  no 
longer  subject  to  the  lusts  of  man  but  to  the 
will  of  God.  Nay,  more  than  that,  if  any 
man  is  in  Christ,  he  is  passed  from  death 
unto  life,  from  the  death  of  sin  to  the  life  of 
righteousness ;  he  is  born  again,  begotten  of 
God,  born  not  of  blood,  nor  of  the  will  of  the 
flesh,  nor  of  the  will  of  man,  but  of  God  ;  the 


AS  A   FACT  OF   CONSCIOUSNESS         25 

man  he  was,  "  the  old  man,"  has  ceased  to 
be,  and  in  his  stead  has  arisen  "  the  new 
man,"  created  in  righteousness  and  holiness 
of  truth.  In  one  word,  if  any  man  is  in 
Christ,  he  is  a  new  creature  ;  the  old  things 
are  passed  away ;  behold  they  are  become 
new}  Now  all  this  is  not  to  be  dismissed  as 
the  language  of  poetry  or  rhetoric  ;  it  is  the 
speech  of  men  in  contact  with  reality,  who 
speak  what  they  do  know  and  bear  witness 
of  that  they  have  seen  ;  and  it  is  surely  a 
reasonable  thing  to  ask  of  thought  which 
aspires  to  be  scientific  that  it  shall  take  these 
things  into  its  reckoning. 

(2)  We  turn  from  the  Church  of  the  first 
days  to  the  Church  of  the  centuries.  And  if 
after  ages  have  witnessed  nothing  quite  like 
that  which  Ephesus  and  Rome  and  Corinth 
saw;  if  there  has  been  no  second  Paul  to 
cleave  a  lane  of  light  through  the  world's 
darkness ;  if  the  gold  has  become  dim,  and 
the  silver  dross,  and  the  wine  mixed  with 
water ;  yet,   on  the   other  hand,    there   has 

1  Col.  1:13;  I  Peter  4:2;  1  John  3  :  14  ;  1  Peter  2:  24; 
1  John  3:9 ;  John  1: 13;  Eph.  4 ;  22-24  J  2 Cor«  5  :  *7. 


26  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

never  been  a  time  when  men  had  no  ex- 
periences of  their  own  out  of  which  to  in- 
terpret the  deep  things  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment ;  there  has  never  been  a  time  when 
Drummond's  words  concerning  "the  con- 
temporary activities  of  the  Holy  Ghost,  and 
the  facts  of  regeneration,  and  the  powers 
which  are  freeing  men  from  sin,"  had  not  a 
meaning  in  them.  The  phenomena  with 
which  these  lectures  deal  belong  not  to  one 
century  only  but  to  all  the  centuries  of 
Christian  history,, 

Let  me  touch  for  a  moment — and  alas  !  a 
paragraph  must  serve  where  a  lecture  would 
be  insufficient — upon  the  witness  to  conver- 
sion of  the  psalms  and  hymns  and  spiritual 
songs  of  the  Church.  It  is  a  curious  fact 
which  has  often  been  commented  on,  that 
our  best  hymns  maintain  their  place  in  the 
worship  of  the  Church,  wholly  irrespective 
either  of  the  theological  position  of  their 
authors,  or  the  changing  fashions  of  religious 
thought.  For  every  ten  persons  who  now 
read  John  Wesley's  Sermons  or  Notes  on 
the   New    Testament  there  are  probably  ten 


AS  A   FACT  OF   CONSCIOUSNESS         27 

thousand  who  sing  Charles  Wesley's  hymns. 
Toplady's  controversial  writings,  which  once 
made  so  great  a  noise  in  the  world,  have  long 
since  fallen  on  sleep  ;  but  "  Rock  of  Ages  " 
is  secure  of  immortality.  Style,  it  is  said,  is 
the  great  antiseptic,  yet  even  Newman's  win- 
ning style  will  not  preserve  for  our  children 
more  than  a  very  few  of  the  many  volumes 
of  the  great  Oxford  scholar  ;  but  will  "  Lead 
Kindly  Light "  ever  be  forgotten  ?  What  is 
the  explanation  of  facts  like  these  ?  It  is  cer- 
tainly not  to  be  found  in  any  perfection  of 
literary  form.  There  are  some  hymns  indeed, 
such,  e.  g.y  as  Cowper's 

There  is  a  fountain  filled  with  blood 
Drawn  from  Immanuel's  veins  ; 

or  John  Wesley's  translation  of  Rothe's 

Now  I  have  found  the  ground  wherein 

Sure  my  soul's  anchor  may  remain — 
The  wounds  of  Jesus, 

which,  despite  the  harsh  or  incongruous  met- 
aphors with  which  they  are  disfigured,  still 
keep  their  place  from  generation  to  genera- 


28  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

tion.1  What  then  is  the  explanation  ?  Surely 
it  is  that  such  hymns  are  the  direct  and  spon- 
taneous expression  of  experience.  "They 
are,"  as  one  writer  says,  "  but  one  degree  re- 
moved from  the  concrete  fact." 2  And  the  rea- 
son why  intelligent  Christian  congregations 
to-day  do  not  tire  of  singing 

I  heard  the  voice  of  Jesus  say, 
Come  unto  Me  and  rest ; 


or, 


O  happy  day  that  fixed  my  choice 
On  Thee  my  Saviour  and  my  God  ! 


is    simply   because    they    have    themselves 
shared  in  the  experience  out  of  which  the 

1 "  A  distinguished  critic  of  our  times,  in  his  professorial 
chair,  is  reported  one  day  to  have  held  out  in  one  hand  The 
Golden  Treasury  of  Songs  and  Lyrics,  collected  by  Francis 
Palgrave,  and  in  the  other  The  Book  of  Praise,  collected 
from  all  English  Hymnody  by  Lord  Selborne,  and  to  have 
asked  '  Why  is  it  that  The  Golden  Treasury  contains  al- 
most nothing  that  is  bad,  and  why  is  it  that  The  Book  of 
Praise  contains  almost  nothing  that  is  good  ?  '  "  (Dean 
Stanley  in  The  English  Poets,  edited  by  T.  H.  Ward,  Vol. 
Ill,  p.  255.)  The  "  distinguished  critic's  "  judgment  is  far 
too  sweeping,  but  there  is  sufficient  truth  in  it  to  justify  the 
statement  made  above. 

s  The  Religion  of  a  Mature  Mind,  by  G.  A.  Coe,  p.  65. 


AS   A  FACT   OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         2Q 

song  arose,  and  still  find  in  it  adequate  and 
satisfying  expression  of  the  great  spiritual 
realities  of  which  they  are  conscious. 

(3)  It  is,  however,  in  the  field  of  Christian 
biography  that  the  richest  results  await  the 
student  of  conversion.  Indeed,  I  am  em- 
barrassed by  the  very  abundance  of  the  ma- 
terial available.  At  most  I  can  but  present  a 
mere  handful  of  illustrations,  and  the  prob- 
lem is  so  to  select  these  that  they  shall  sug- 
gest to  others  the  wealth  and  fertility  of  the 
goodly  land  from  which  they  are  gathered. 
For  the  present  I  omit  altogether  any  refer- 
ences to  the  familiar  cases  of  St.  Augustine, 
Luther,  Bunyan,  Wesley  and  Chalmers  ;  and 
I  do  so  not  because  these  are  not  wholly 
revelant  to  our  discussion — indeed  the  mere 
mention  of  such  names  is  sufficient  to  show 
the  significance  to  Christian  history  of  the 
fact  of  conversion — but  because  over-exclu- 
sive attention  to  the  evidence  of  a  few  out- 
standing witnesses  may  conceal  the  range 
and  variety  of  the  testimony  by  which  in  the 
long  run  judgment  must  be  determined.  In 
the  examples  which  I  adduce  I  shall  leave 


30  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

the  witness,  whenever  possible,  to  tell  his 
story  in  his  own  way  and  in  his  own 
words. 

I  begin  with  John  Donne,  the  poet-preacher 
of  St.  Paul's,  the  story  of  whose  life  has  been 
told,  in  one  of  the  gem-like  biographies  of 
Izaak  Walton.  Donne's  career  has  been 
often  compared  with  that  of  St.  Augustine. 
There  was  in  him,  says  Trench,  "  the  same 
tumultuous  youth,  the  same  entanglement  in 
youthful  lusts,  the  same  conflict  with  these 
and  the  same  final  deliverance  from  them  ; 
and  then  the  same  passionate  and  personal 
grasp  of  the  central  truths  of  Christianity, 
linking  itself  as  this  did,  with  all  that  he  had 
suffered  and  all  that  he  had  sinned  and  all 
through  which,  by  God's  grace,  he  had  vic- 
toriously struggled."  How  or  when  the 
great  change  took  place  we  do  not  know,  but 
the  change  itself  is  there  for  all  men  to  see. 
"  It  was,  therefore,  no  pious  platitude,  no  bar- 
ren truism,  no  phrase  of  conventional  ortho- 
doxy, but  the  profound  conviction  of  a  sinful, 
sorrowing,  forgiven,  thanksgiving  man, 
when  he  speaks  of  '  the  sovereign  balm  of 


AS  A   FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         3 1 

our  souls,  the  blood  of  Christ  Jesus.'  "  '  For 
the  rest  it  is  enough  to  quote  some  lines  of 
his  own,  written  in  later  years  on  a  sick-bed  : 

Wilt  Thou  forgive  that  sin  where  I  begun, 

Which  was  my  sin,  though  it  were  done  before? 

Wilt  Thou  forgive  that  sin,  through  which  I  run 
And  do  run  still,  though  still  I  do  deplore? 

When  Thou  hast  done,  Thou  hast  not  done ; 
For  I  have  more. 

Wilt  Thou  forgive  that  sin  which  I  have  won 
Others  to  sin,  and  made  my  sins  their  door  ? 

Wilt  Thou  forgive  that  sin  which  I  did  shun 
A  year  or  two,  but  wallowed  in  a  score  ? 

When  Thou  hast  done,  Thou  hast  not  done 
For  I  have  more. 

I  have  a  sin  of  fear,  that  when  I've  spun 
My  last  thread,  I  shall  perish  on  the  shore ; 

But  swear  by  Thyself,  that  at  my  death  Thy  Son 
Shall  shine,  as  He  shines  now  and  heretofore ; 

And  having  done  that,  Thou  hast  done  ; 
I  fear  no  more. 

John  Donne  passed  away  when  the  fires  of 
the  Great  Rebellion  were  smouldering 
throughout  England.  During  the  Puritan 
period  which  followed  our  conversion  records 

1  Lightfoot's  Historical  Essays,  to  which  I  am  also  in- 
debted for  the  quotation  from  Archbishop  Trench. 


32  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

steadily  increase.  We  may  take  as  thor- 
oughly typical  that  of  the  great  Protector, 
Oliver  Cromwell  himself.  "It  is  in  these 
years  undated  by  history  " — writes  Carlyle 
under  the  date  1623 — "  that  we  must  place 
Oliver's  clear  recognition  of  Calvinistic 
Christianity  ;  what  he,  with  unspeakable  joy, 
would  name  his  conversion  ;  his  deliverance 
from  the  jaws  of  eternal  death.  Certainly  a 
grand  epoch  for  a  man :  properly  the  one 
epoch  ;  the  turning  point  which  guides  up- 
wards, or  guides  downwards  him  and  his  ac- 
tivity forevermore."  The  circumstances  of 
the  crisis  are  unknown  to  us,  but  the  charac- 
ter and  reality  of  it  are  writ  large,  both  in 
Cromwell's  public  and  private  life,  and  in 
well-known  words  of  his  own  in  which  long 
afterwards  he  made  reference  to  it :  "  You 
know  what  my  manner  of  life  hath  been. 
Oh,  I  lived  in  and  loved  darkness,  and  hated 
light;  I  was  a  chief,  the  chief  of  sinners. 
This  is  true  :  I  hated  godliness,  yet  God  had 
mercy  on  me.  O  the  richness  of  His  mercy  ! " 
It  is  surely  significant  of  much  that  at  the 
very  root  of  all  that  Cromwell  did  for  Eng- 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         33 

land  and  for  England's  civil  and  religious 
liberties,  there  lies  this  great  experience  in 
his  personal  history — his  consciousness  of  sin 
and  of  the  forgiving  mercy  of  God. 

From  the  seventeenth  I  turn  to  the  eight- 
eenth century,  and  to  the  great  days  of  the 
Evangelical  Revival.  And  now  our  docu- 
ments multiply  fast.  Here  is  one  from  that 
great  arsenal  of  facts,  The  Lives  of  Early 
Methodist  Preachers.  Sampson  Staniforth 
was  a  Methodist  soldier  in  the  campaign  of 
Fontenoy,  and  tells  his  conversion  in  words 
which,  as  Matthew  Arnold  says,  bear  plainly 
marked  on  them  the  very  stamp  of  good 
faith  : 

"  From  twelve  at  night  till  two  it  was  my 
turn  to  stand  sentinel  at  a  dangerous  post. 
I  had  a  fellow  sentinel  but  I  desired  him  to 
go  away,  which  he  willingly  did.  As  soon 
as  I  was  alone  I  kneeled  down  and  deter- 
mined not  to  rise,  but  to  continue  crying  and 
wrestling  with  God  till  He  had  mercy  on  me. 
How  long  I  was  in  that  agony  I  cannot  tell ; 
but  as  I  looked  up  to  heaven,  I  saw  the 
clouds  open  exceeding  bright  and  I  saw  Jesus 


34  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

hanging  on  the  cross.  At  the  same  moment 
these  words  were  applied  to  my  heart,  '  Thy 
sins  are  forgiven  thee.'  My  chains  fell  off ; 
my  heart  was  free.  All  guilt  was  gone  and 
my  soul  was  filled  with  unutterable  peace. 
I  loved  God  and  all  mankind  and  the  fear  of 
death  and  hell  was  vanished  away.  I  was 
filled  with  wonder  and  astonishment.  I 
then  closed  my  eyes  but  the  impression  was 
still  the  same.  And  for  about  ten  weeks 
while  I  was  awake  let  me  be  where  I  would 
the  same  appearance  was  still  before  my  eyes 
and  the  same  impression  upon  my  heart, 
'  Thy  sins  are  forgiven  thee.'  " l 

It  is  a  far  cry  from  Sampson  Staniforth  and 
the  battle-fields  of  the  Low  Countries  to  Wil- 
liam Cowper  and  the  quiet  lanes  of  Bucking- 
hamshire. But  the  gentle  poet  of  Olney  has 
his  place  among  these  records  no  less  than 
the  plain  soldier.     And  in  the  poet's  case  we 

i  The  Early  Methodist  Preachers,  Vol.  IV,  p.  22.  It  is 
perhaps  worth  mentioning  that  Dr.  Joseph  Parker  used  to  read 
these  simple,  little,  unpretentious  biographies  on  Saturday  even- 
ings as  the  best    preparation  for  the  work  of  the  coming  day. 

Matthew  Arnold's  reference  to  Staniforth  will  be  found  in 
his  essay,  St.  Paul  and  Protestantism. 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         35 

are  fortunate  in  possessing  two  accounts  of 
his  conversion,  one  in  prose,  the  other  in 
verse  and  both  from  his  own  pen.  I  quote 
them  both  without  comment : 

"  I  flung  myself  into  a  chair  near  the  win- 
dow and  seeing  a  Bible  there  ventured  once 
more  to  apply  to  it  for  comfort  and  instruc- 
tion. The  first  verse  I  saw  was  the  twenty- 
fifth  of  the  third  chapter  of  Romans  :  ■  Whom 
God  hath  set  forth  to  be  a  propitiation 
through  faith  in  His  blood,  to  declare  His 
righteousness  for  the  remission  of  sins  that 
are  past  through  the  forbearance  of  God.' 
Immediately  I  received  strength  to  believe 
and  the  full  beams  of  the  Sun  of  Righteous- 
ness shone  upon  me.  I  saw  the  sufficiency 
of  the  atonement  He  had  made,  my  pardon 
sealed  in  His  blood  and  all  the  fulness  and 
completeness  of  His  justification.  In  a  mo- 
ment I  believed  and  received  the  gospel. 
.  .  .  Unless  the  Almighty  arm  had 
been  under  me  I  think  I  should  have  died 
with  gratitude  and  joy.  My  eyes  filled  with 
tears  and  my  voice  choked  with  transport,  I 
could  only  look  up  to  heaven  in  silent  fear, 


36  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

overwhelmed  with  love  and  wonder.  .  .  . 
For  many  succeeding  weeks  tears  were  ready 
to  flow  if  I  did  but  speak  of  the  gospel  or 
mention  the  name  of  Jesus.  To  rejoice  day 
and  night  was  all  my  employment.  Too 
happy  to  sleep  much  I  thought  it  was  lost 
time  that  was  spent  in  slumber." 

And  now  here  is  the  same  story  set  to  the 
moving  music  of  The  Task  : 

"  I  was  a  stricken  deer  that  left  the  herd 

Long  since  :  with  many  an  arrow  deep  infixed 
My  panting  side  was  charged,  when  I  withdrew 
To  seek  a  tranquil  death  in  distant  shades. 
There  was  I  found  by  One  who  had  Himself 
Been  hurt  by  the  archers.     In  His  side  He  bore, 
And  in  His  hands  and  feet,  the  cruel  scars. 
With  gentle  force  soliciting  the  darts, 
He  drew   them  forth   and  healed  and  bade   me 
live."  « 

With  the  name  of  William  Cowper  is  in- 
separably associated  that  of  John  Newton. 

1  See  T.  Wright's  Life  of  IV.  Cowper,  and  also  an  admi- 
rable article  by  the  late  Arthur  Moorhouse  in  the  London 
Quarterly  Review,  April,  1900.  "  However  obsolete,"  says 
Mr.  Goldwin  Smith,  "  Cowper's  belief,  and  the  language  in 
which  he  expresses  it  may  have  become  for  many  of  us,  we 
must  take  it  as  his  philosophy  of  life."     Undoubtedly  we  must. 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         37 

Newton's  own  thrilling  story  I  am  compelled 
reluctantly  to  pass  over  ; 1  but  linked  with  it 
are  two  other  names  which  well  deserve  a 
place  in  this  brief  chronicle.  It  was — as 
every  reader  of  the  Force  of  Truth  will  re- 
member— mainly  to  Newton  that  Thomas 
Scott,  whose  famous  Commentary  was  once 
to  be  found  in  all  the  households  of  the 
pious,  owed  his  own  soul.  Eighty  or  ninety 
years  went  by,  and  then  (in  1864)  we  find 
John  Henry  Newman  making  acknowledg- 
ment in  his  Apologia  of  a  like  indebtedness 
to  Scott.  "  The  writer,"  he  says,  speaking  of 
his  early  years,  "  who  made  a  deeper  impres- 
sion on  my  mind  than  any  other,  and  to 
whom  (humanly  speaking)  I  almost  owe  my 
soul,  was  Thomas  Scott,  of  Aston  Sandford." 
Indeed,  Newman's  language  concerning  his 
conversion  could  hardly  have  been  more  ex- 
plicit had  his  place  been  in  the  great  Evan- 

1  His  striking  autobiographical  poem  beginning  "  In  Evil 
long  I  took  Delight,"  should  not  be  overlooked  by  those  in 
search  of  conversion  documents.  As  Prof.  Palgrave  (who 
includes  it  in  his  Treasury  of  Sacred  Song)  truly  says,  its 
bare  simplicity  and  sincerity  suffice  to  range  it  among  the  most 
powerful  hymns  in  our  language ;  John  Bunyan  might  have 
been  proud  or  thankful  to  own  it. 


38  THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

gelical  Succession.  On  the  same  page  of 
the  Apologia  as  that  from  which  I  have  just 
quoted  he  declares  that  the  "  outward  con- 
version "  of  which  as  a  lad  of  fifteen  he  was 
conscious,  he  is  still  more  certain  of  than  that 
he  has  hands  and  feet.  Nor  did  his  lan- 
guage on  the  subject  ever  change.  As  late 
as  1885  we  find  him  writing:  "Of  course  I 
cannot  myself  be  the  judge  of  myself ;  but 
speaking  with  this  reserve,  I  should  say  that 
it  is  difficult  to  realize  or  imagine  the 
identity  of  the  boy  before  and  after  August, 
18 16.  .  .  .  I  can  look  back  at  the  end  of 
seventy  years  as  if  on  another  person." 1 

Thus  far  our  illustrations  have  all  been 
drawn  from  the  past.  Will  the  records  fail 
us  when  we  come  to  the  life  of  to-day? 
"  Election,  conversion,  day  of  grace,  coming 
to  Christ,"  writes  Mr.  Froude,  "  have  been 
pawed  and  fingered  by  unctuous  hands  for 
now  two  hundred  years.  The  bloom  is  gone 
from  the  flower.  The  plumage,  once  shin- 
ing with  hues  direct  from  heaven,  is  soiled 

1  Letters  and  Correspondence  of  J.  H.  Newman,  edited  bj 
Anne  Mozley,  Vol.  I,  p.  22. 


AS  A  FACT   OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         39 

and  bedraggled.  The  most  solemn  of  all 
realities  have  been  degraded  into  the  pass- 
words of  technical  theology."  '  Is  it  really 
so?  Or  is  this  simply  the  language  of  a 
man  who  is  writing  with  his  eye  off  the  facts  ? 
It  would,  I  think,  be  a  legitimate  answer  to 
the  critic  who  roundly  asserts  that  conver- 
sions have  ceased,  to  bid  him  examine  for 
himself  the  results  of  such  a  work  as  is  be- 
ing carried  on  to-day  in  England  by  the 
great  Manchester  Mission.  We  might  also 
put  in  as  an  entirely  revelant  bit  of  evidence 
the  mass  of  facts  contained  in  such  a  book 
as  Down  in  Water  Street  by  Samuel  H. 
Hadley,  of  the  old  Jerry  McAuley  Mission 
in  New  York.2  It  seems  best,  however,  to 
keep  to  the  track  which  has  thus  far  been 
followed,   and  to  illustrate   the  present  day 


1  Bunyan,  English  Men  of  Letters  series,  p.  34. 

2  Cf.  the  simple  testimony  of  a  Lancashire  drunkard 
quoted  in  Prof.  W.  T.  Davison's  Christian  Interpretation 
of  Life :  "  Religion  has  changed  my  home,  my  heart,  and 
you  can  all  see  it  has  even  changed  my  face.  I  hear  some  of 
these  London  men  call  themselves  Positivists.  Bless  God,  I 
am  a  Positivist.  I'm  positive  God,  for  Christ's  sake,  has  par- 
doned my  sins,  changed  my  heart,  and  made  me  a  new 
creature." 


40  THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

witness   to    conversion   from   contemporary 
biography. 

In  1889  the  late  revered  Prof.  Franz 
Delitzsch  of  Leipsic,  published  a  remarkable 
11  Last  Confession  of  Faith "  from  which  I 
take  the  following  words:  "The  subjec- 
tivity of  science  finds  a  wholesome  check 
in  the  office  of  a  preacher  and  guardian  of 
souls.  ...  In  the  Muldenthal  I  was,  as 
a  young  man,  a  witness  of  soul-struggles 
and  spiritual  victories,  which  rendered  dis- 
tasteful to  me  forever  the  overestimation 
of  science.  Still  does  my  spiritual  life  find 
its  root  in  the  miraculous  soil  of  that  first 
love  which  I  experienced  with  Lehmann 
Zopffel,  Ferdinand  Walther,  and  Burger; 
still  to  me  is  the  reality  of  miracles  sealed  by 
the  miracles  of  grace  which  I  saw  with  my 
own  eyes  in  the  congregations  of  this  blessed 
valley.  And  the  faith  which  I  professed  in 
my  first  sermons  which  I  could  maintain  in 
Niederfrohna  and  Lunzenau,  remains  mine  to- 
day, undiminished  in  strength  and  immeasur- 
ably higher  than  all  earthly  knowledge."  1 

»  TAe  Expositor,  third  series,  Vol.  ix. 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         4 1 

Even  more  striking,  perhaps,  was  the  story 
of  his  own  conversion,  told  recently  to  the 
young  men  in  his  theological  class-room,  by 
a  young  Swiss  professor — the  late  Gaston 
Frommel.  One  of  his  courses  on  the  History 
of  Dogma,  had  led  some  of  the  students  at 
Geneva  to  regard  Christianity  as  a  mere 
product  of  evolution.  To  correct  this  mis- 
apprehension he  judged  it  necessary  to  offer 
a  "frank  explanation":  "To  the  question, 
How  do  you  succeed  in  maintaining  the 
affirmations  of  your  religious  consciousness 
over  against  the  frequently  contrary  affirma- 
tions of  science  ?  .  .  .  the  reply  is  easy. 
My  religious  consciousness,  in  its  sources  and 
its  contents,  is  independent  of  my  scientific 
consciousness.  And  I  add  that,  in  my  own 
case,  it  was  a  long  way  anterior.  I  was  a 
Christian  before  I  was  a  theologian  :  I  did 
not  become  a  Christian  because  I  was  a 
theologian ;  I  became  a  theologian  because 
I  was  a  Christian."  Then  he  described  the 
crisis  in  his  spiritual  history  and  the  result : 
"  That  day  now  lies  a  long  way  behind  me  in 
the  past ;  but  it  shines  there  as  the  day  of  a 


42  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

new  birth.  And,  in  fact,  all  things  thencefor- 
ward became  new  to  me.  Doubtless,  alas  I 
there  have  since  been  many  failures,  many  de- 
fects on  my  part,  many  interruptions  of  my 
consecration,  many  breaches  of  Christian 
fidelity,  many  faults  and  those  very  culpable. 
They  have  not  effaced  the  fact  that  I  belonged 
to  Christ.  It  was  but  a  first  starting-point 
which  needed  to  be  followed  by  many  others. 
But  it  was  a  starting-point.  For  that  which 
Christ  then  became  for' me  He  has  been  ever 
since.  The  assurance  of  forgiveness,"  the 
certainty  of  salvation,  the  inward -witness  of 
His  grace,  He  has  faithfully  bestowed  day 
after  day.  They  are  the  strength  of  my  life 
and  the  sole  reason  of  my  ministry.  "  ' 

It  may,  perhaps,  be  urged  that  both  these, 
and  indeed  most  of  my  examples,  are  drawn 
from  the  inner  circle  of  ecclesiastical  influence. 
Without  for  a  moment  admitting  the  validity 
of  the  objection,  I  will  meet  it  so  far  as  to 
look  elsewhere  for  my  four  final  examples. 

In    the    life    story    of    Adeline    Countess 

1 1  am  indebted  for  this  delightful  incident  to  a  writer  in  The 
Expository  Times,  December,  1907. 


AS  A   FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         43 

Schimmelmann — published  in  England  in 
1896 — that  distinguished  German  lady  gives 
an  account  of  her  conversion.  After  weeks 
of  darkness  and  uncertainty,  she  seemed,  she 
says,  to  hear  God  saying  to  her  :  "  My  child, 
thy  salvation  does  not  depend  upon  thy  love 
to  Me,  but  upon  My  love  to  thee,  just  as  thou 
art."  "Then,"  she  says,  "broke  in  upon 
my  heart  a  sun  of  joy  in  the  beams  of  which 
I  still  rejoice,  and  whose  light  will  shine  upon 
me  eternally.  Now  my  cold  heart  began  to 
burn,  not  on  account  of  my  love  to  Christ, 
but  because  of  His  love  to  me." 

This  is  how  the  same  event  is  described  in 
Mr.  Frank  *T.  Bullen's  delightful  autobiog- 
raphy, With  Christ  at  Sea :  "  There  was 
no  extravagant  joy,  no  glorious  bursting  into 
light  and  liberty  such  as  I  have  since  read 
about  as  happening  on  such  occasions ;  it 
was  just  a  lesson  learned,  the  satisfaction 
consequent  upon  finding  one's  way  after  long 
groping  in  darkness  and  misery — a  way  that 
led  to  peace.  I  love  that  description  of  con- 
version as  the  '  new  birth.'  No  other  defini- 
tion touches  the  truth  of  the  process  at  all, 


44  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

so  helpless,  so  utterly  knowledgeless,  possess- 
ing nothing  but  the  consciousness  of  life  just 
begun,  is  the  new-born  Christian." 

In  a  little  pamphlet  written  on  the  Welsh 
Revival  of  a  few  years  ago,  Mr.  W.  T.  Stead, 
the  well-known  journalist,  describes  in  detail 
a  definite  religious  experience  through  which 
he  passed  when  a  schoolboy  twelve  years  of 
age.     Then  come  these  words  : 

"  Whatever  may  be  the  objective  reality  of 
the  altered  relations  which  I  then  recognized 
as  existing  between  my  soul  and  its  Maker, 
there  is  absolutely  no  question  as  to  the  abid- 
ing nature  of  the  change  it  affected  in  my 
life.  It  is  forty-three  years  since  that  Revival 
at  school.  The  whole  of  my  life  during  all 
these  forty-three  years  has  been  influenced 
by  the  change  which  men  call  conversion 
which  occurred  with  me  when  I  was  twelve. 
My  views  as  to  many  things  have  naturally 
broadened  much  in  these  forty-three  years. 
But  that  was  the  conscious  starting  point  of 
everything  that  there  has  been  in  my  life  of 
good  or  of  service  for  my  fellow  creatures. 
.    .    .     My     life     has    been    flawed    with 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         45 

many  failures,  darkened  with  many  sins,  but 
the  thing  in  it  which  was  good,  which  has 
enabled  me  to  resist  temptations  to  which  I 
would  otherwise  have  succumbed,  to  bear 
burdens  which  would  otherwise  have  crushed 
me  with  their  weight  and  which  has 
kept  the  soul  within  me  ever  joyfully  con- 
scious that,  despite  all  appearances  to  the  con- 
trary, this  is  God's  world,  and  that  He  and 
I  are  fellow  workers  in  the  work  of  its  reno- 
vation— that  potent  thing,  whatever  you  may 
call  it,  and  however  you  may  explain  it,  came 
into  my  life  then,  and  abides  with  me  to  this 
hour ; — my  one  incentive  and  inspiration  in 
this  life ;  my  sole  hope  for  that  which  is  to 
come." 

And  now  to  these  confessions  of  a  jour- 
nalist, a  seaman  and  a  countess,  let  me 
add  the  unforgettable  testimony  of  James 
Smetham,  artist  and  letter-writer  : 

"  Whatever  I  have  studied  of  them," — he 
writes,  speaking  of  the  epistles  of  St.  Paul — 
"  and  this  has  been  for  many  years,  and  with 
as  much  yearning  eagerness  and  breathless 
awe  as   I   have   felt   in   nothing  except  the 


46  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

words  of  the  Lord  Jesus,  has  tended  to  the 
confirmation  of  the  old  evangelic  interpreta- 
tion of  them,  in  which,  perhaps,  I  should  not 
have  seen  my  way  so  clearly  but  for  their  ac- 
cordance with  my  own  experience.  All  that 
unutterable  sense  of  sin,  that  terrible  deadly 
fight  with  evil,  those  strivings  of  the  Spirit  I 
went  through,  and  more  ;  all  that  deliver- 
ance, that  liberty  of  the  gospel,  that  being 
justified  by  faith  in  Christ,  that  peace  with 
God,  that  shedding  abroad  by  the  Holy 
Ghost  of  the  love  of  God  in  the  heart,  that 
coming  in  of  the  '  new  creation ' ;  all  the 
shades  and  lights  of  experience  since  then. 
Twenty-three  years  of  such  experience,  which 
inwardly  is  as  great  and  as  simple  a  fact  as 
the  facts  of  seeing  and  hearing,  make  me  un- 
able to  receive,  even  to  perceive,  any  other 
interpretation.  And  I  have  met  with  such 
scores  and  hundreds  who  strike  hands  with 
me  in  life  and  death  on  these  great  matters 
that  it  is  settled  •  without  controversy '  to 
me."  ! 

(4)     I  have  lingered,  it  may  be  thought 

1  Letters  of  James  Smetham,  p.  203. 


AS   A   FACT   OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         47 

unnecessarily  long,  over  these  personal  testi- 
monies. But  I  have  done  so  advisedly  be- 
cause I  know  of  no  other  way  except  the 
multiplication  of  concrete  examples  by  which 
the  strength  of  the  case  for  the  reality  of  con- 
version as  a  fact  of  consciousness  can  be 
brought  home  to  us.  And  yet,  be  it  remem- 
bered, the  recorded  cases,  of  which  I  have 
given  a  few  illustrations,  are  but  a  tiny  frag- 
ment of  the  whole.  Whenever  a  great  wave 
of  spiritual  power — such,  e.g.,  as  we  associate 
with  the  names  of  Edwards,  and  Wesley  and 
Moody,  and  Evan  Roberts — has  passed  over 
a  people,  it  is  always  easy  to  find  traces  of 
its  influence  in  the  records  of  national  biog- 
raphy. But  behind  these  whose  voices  reach 
us,  is  a  great  host  of  silent  witnesses  whose 
faces  no  man  can  number,  but  whose  con- 
sciousness of  "  the  powers  that  are  freeing 
men  from  sin  "  is  no  whit  less  real.  Let  me 
illustrate  what  I  mean.  When  Moody  and 
Sankey  were  conducting  their  wonderful  mis- 
sion in  Great  Britain  and  Ireland  in  1873-5 
— a  mission  by  which  Prof.  George  Adam 
Smith  once  declared  our  people  were  stirred 


48  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

as  they  had  not  been  since  the  days  of  Wes- 
ley and  Whitefield — one  of  the  cities  which 
they  visited  was  Birmingham,  where  the  late 
Dr.  Dale  was  then  exercising  his  ministry. 
Now  Dale  was,  of  all  men,  the  least  likely  to 
be  swept  off  his  feet  by  a  wave  of  mere  relig- 
ious excitement ;  yet  this  is  how  he  describes 
what  he  saw  :  "I  had  seen  occasional  in- 
stances before  of  instant  transition  from  re- 
ligious anxiety  to  the  clear  and  triumphant 
consciousness  of  restoration  to  God  ;  but  what 
struck  me  in  the  gallery  of  Bingley  Hall  was 
the  fact  that  this  instant  transition  took  place 
with  nearly  every  person  with  whom  I  talked. 
They  had  come  up  into  the  gallery  anxious, 
restless,  feeling  after  God  in  the  darkness, 
and  when  after  a  conversation  of  a  quarter  of 
an  hour  or  twenty  minutes,  they  went  away, 
their  faces  were  filled  with  light  and  they  left 
me  not  only  at  peace  with  God  but  filled  with 
joy.  I  have  seen  the  sun  rise  from  the  top 
of  Helvellyn  and  the  top  of  the  Righi,  and 
there  is  something  very  glorious  in  it ;  but 
to  see  the  light  of  heaven  suddenly  strike  on 
man  after  man  in  the  course  of  one  evening 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         49 

is  very  much  more  thrilling."  *  It  is  men 
and  women  such  as  these  of  whom  I  am 
thinking  when  I  speak  of  the  great  host  of 
silent  witnesses  to  the  fact  of  conversion. 
They  are  to  be  found  in  all  our  Churches ; 
every  minister  knows  of  them  ;  and  their  real, 
if  unrecorded,  testimony  is  not  the  least  part 
of  the  case  which  Christianity  presents  to 
science  for  inquiry  and  for  judgment. 

II 
This  hasty  survey  of  a  part  of  the  wide 
field  which  lies  open  to  our  observation  will 
have  prepared  the  way  for  two  or  three  very 
brief  generalizations.  It  is  patent,  I  hope, 
'  by  this  time,  even  to  the  most  prejudiced, 
that  we  are  dealing  with  facts  neither  few  nor 
obscure.  They  are  peculiar  to  no  period  ; 
they  are  bound  up  with  no  artificially  stimu- 
lated conditions  ;  only  wilful  ignorance  could 
suggest  that  they  are  the  offspring  of  youth, 
or  poverty,  or  superstition.  When  the  late 
Prof.  Romanes  was  slowly  feeling  his  way 
back    to    the    Christian    faith    and   fold,   it 

1  The  Congregationalist,  March,  1875. 


50  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

was — with  a  scientist's  instinct  for  facts — 
upon  the  significance  of  these  things  that  he 
laid  his  finger:  "Saint  Augustine  after  thirty 
years  of  age,  and  other  Fathers,"  he  says, 
"  bear  testimony  to  a  sudden  enduring  and 
extraordinary  change  in  themselves,  called 
conversion.  Now  this  experience,"  he  goes 
on,  "  has  been  repeated  and  testified  to  by 
countless  millions  of  civilized  men  and 
women  in  all  nations  and  all  degrees  of  cul- 
ture." l 

It  may  further  be  observed  that,  vast  as  is 
the  multitude  of  witnesses  which  we  have 
summoned,  their  testimony  is  essentially  one. 
If  we  can  imagine  them  closeted  in  confer- 
ence, though  in  nothing  else  they  could 
agree,  they  would  speak  with  a  single  voice 
of  their  debt  to  Christ,  and  to  the  divine 
grace  which  has  redeemed  them.  Nor  does 
this  unity  mean  th  t  the  multitude  is  simply 
the  echo  of  its  le  ders.  Prof.  James  may 
be  claimed  as  an  impartial  witness,  and 
he  declares  unhesitatingly  that,  whatever 
part    suggestion    and    imitation   may   have 

1  Thoughts  on  Religion,  by  the  late  G.  J.  Romanes,  p.  162. 


AS   A   FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         51 

played  in  producing  conversion  experiences 
in  men  and  women  in  excited  assemblies, 
"  they  have  at  any  rate  been  in  countless  in- 
dividual instances  an  original  and  unbor- 
rowed experience."  ! 

The  hysteria,  the  strange  "  bodily  effects," 
the  general  emotional  extravagances,  by 
which  conversion  has  sometimes  been  at- 
tended, may  for  our  present  purpose  be 
wholly  disregarded.  If  we  like  to  use  the 
psychological  jargon  of  the  hour,  we  shall  I 
suppose  ascribe  them  to  "  the  subject's  hav- 
ing a  large  subliminal  region  " ;  if  we  are 
wise  perhaps  we  shall  not  greatly  concern 
ourselves  about  them  at  all ;  but  however 
we  explain  them,  they  have,  as  Prof.  James 
says,  no  essential  spiritual  significance. 
Their  presence  may  make  his  conversion 
more  memorable  to  the  convert,  but  they  are 
neither  a  proof  of  its  reality,  nor  a  guarantee 
of  its  stability.  On  the  other  hand,  they 
must  not  be  suffered  to  discredit  the  spiritual 
realities  of  which  they  are  the  occasional  ac- 
cessory.    They    are    in    their    very    nature 

1  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  229. 


52  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

evanescent ;    the   one  thing  that  matters   is 
what  remains  when  they  are  gone.1 

And,  finally,  conversions  have  not  ceased. 
The  things  of  which  I  have  spoken  in  this 
lecture  are  very  old  ;  but  they  are  also  very 
new.  The  experience  which  is  written  in  the 
New  Testament,  and  in  the  lives  of  the  saints 
of  sixty  generations,  is  still  being  repeated  in 
our  midst.  Our  witnesses  are  not  of  yester- 
day only,  but  of  to-day,  of  this  day.  Our 
facts  are  not  merely  fossils  dug  from  a  dead 
past ;  they  are  facts  of  the  present,  warm, 
fresh,  living. 

Ill 

What  then  shall  we  say  to  these  things? 
One  thing  we  must  say,  and  must  keep  on 
saying,  and  that  is  that  they  shall  be  reckoned 
with.     It  is  indeed  a  marvellous  thing  that 

1  The  sanity  of  great  evangelistic  leaders  in  this  matter  is 
deserving  of  note.  Mr.  Moody,  says  Prof.  G.  A.  Smith, 
suffered  no  fools,  and  every  symptom  of  the  hysteria  which 
often  breaks  out  in  such  movements,  was  promptly  suppressed. 
Dr.  Dale  notes  the  same  fact.  Prof.  Coe,  writing  of  the 
strange  "  psychic  manifestations  "  which  --sometimes  followed 
the  preaching  of  Wesley,  says  that  perhaps  nothing  in  his 
careeV  more  clearly  reveals  his  marvellous  practical  capacity 
than  his  calm  and  for  the  most  part,  common-sense  treat- 
ment   of  such  occurrences ;  he  had  the  wisdom   to    perceive 


AS  A  FACT  OF  CONSCIOUSNESS         53 

science  should  concern  itself  about  coral  in- 
sects and  climbing  plants,  and  yet  should 
take  no  thought  for  the  facts  of  religious  ex- 
perience. It  would  be  incredible,  if  it  were 
not  true,  that  we  still  have  assailants  and 
critics  of  Christianity  in  our  midst  for  whom 
the  religious  consciousness  simply  does  not 
exist;  they  discuss  what  they  think  the 
claims  of  Christianity  and  pronounce  judg- 
ment against  it,  but  the  chief  witness  is  never 
called.  Such  grotesque  travesties  of  justice 
ought  in  the  future  to  be  laughed  out  of 
court.  Happily,  there  are  signs  of  the  com- 
ing of  a  better  day.  It  is  good  to  be  told 
by  a  competent  authority  that  "  the  natural 
history  of  the  religious  consciousness  as  it 
manifests  itself  in  the  life  of  the  individual 
has  now  taken  its  place  among  the  sciences." x 


that  these  apparently  divine  or  demoniac  possessions,  were 
matters  aside  from  his  main  business.  {The  Spiritual  Life, 
p.  141.)  Of  his  brother  Charles  it  is  said  that  on  one  occasion 
he  notified  his  congregation  that  any  one  who  was  convulsed 
should  be  carried  out,  and  that  the  notice  ensured  perfect 
quiet. 

1  Prof.  W.  R.  Inge  in  a  paper  entitled  "  Ancient  Faith  and 
Modern  Thought ;  Gains  from  Modern  Psychology,"  read  at 
the  Church  Congress,  Yarmouth,  1907. 


54  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

We  may  not  always  be  able  to  acquiesce  in 
the  findings  of  students  of  the  psychology  of 
religion,  such  as  James,  and  Starbuck  and 
Coe,  but  they  have  at  least  set  a  good  ex- 
ample to  their  fellow  scientists  throughout 
the  world  by  their  serious  handling  of  the 
phenomena  of  the  religious  life.  The  sacred- 
ness  of  fact  is  perhaps  the  supreme  lesson 
which  modern  science  has  impressed  upon 
the  mind  of  this  generation ;  and  at  last 
science  is  beginning  to  learn  its  own  lesson 
and  to  recognize  that  religion  also  has  its 
facts,  and  that  a  soul's  consciousness  of  the 
forgiveness  of  God  and  of  fellowship  with 
Christ  is  just  as  worthy  of  our  patient  regard 
as  the  conformation  of  a  beetle  or  the  doings 
of  an  earthworm. 


LECTURE  II 

THE  REALITY  OF  CONVER- 
SION AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE 


LECTURE  II 

THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 
AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE 

THE  fact  of  conversion,  it  was  stated 
in  the  previous  lecture,  may  be 
studied  in  two  different  ways  :  in 
itself,  or  in  its  practical  results  ;  as  a  fact  of 
consciousness,  or  as  a  fact  for  life.  It  is  this 
latter  aspect  of  the  subject  to  which  we  must 
now  turn  our  attention. 

And  immediately  we  are  on  ground  from 
which  the  modern  mind  is  most  easily  ac- 
cessible, for  we  are  all  "  pragmatists  "  now, 
and  perhaps  a  little  inordinately  vain  of  the 
fact.  We  may  have  our  doubts  about  re- 
vivals, we  may  not  find  the  lives  of  the 
saints  very  appetizing  fare,  but  we  do  believe 
in  goodness  and  are  not  disposed  to  be 
hypercritical  of  anything  that  really  makes 
for  it  "  What  matter,"  Browning  asks, 
57 


58  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

"  What  matter  though  I  doubt  at  every  pore, 

Head-doubts,  heart-doubts,   doubts  at  my  fingers' 

ends, 
Doubts  in  the  trivial  work  of  every  day, 
Doubts  at  the  very  bases  of  my  soul 
In  the  grand  moments  when  she  probes  herself — 
If  finally  I  have  a  life  to  show  ?  ' ' 

Every  heart  vibrates  to  that  string.  The 
question  of  questions  for  many  of  us  to-day 
is  not  so  much,  "Is  it  true?"  but,  "Suppos- 
ing it  to  be  true  what  is  it  good  for  ?  what 
difference  will  it  make  if  a  man  believe  it  ?  " 
And  if  the  answer  be  that  neither  if  a  man 
believes  is  he  the  better,  nor  if  he  believes 
not  is  he  the  worse,  straightway  our  interest 
is  at  an  end.  It  is  not  my  business  just  now 
to  discuss  this  temper  of  mind ;  I  only  note 
it  and  go  on  to  observe  that  in  the  matter  of 
conversion  we  may  accept  this  test  of  utility 
with  all  joy.  "  In  the  absence  of  the  heav- 
enly quality  in  the  life,"  says  Prof.  Coe,1 
"  no  experience  of  internal  wonders  is  valid 
evidence  of  the  birth  from  above.  .  .  .  The 
new  heart  is  to  be  defined  by  its  quality,  not 
by  its  history."    Unquestionably.    "  The  roots 

1  The  Religion  of  a  Mature  Mind,  pp.  20S-210. 


AS   A  FACT   FOR   LIFE  59 

of  a  man's  virtue  are  inaccessible  to  us.  No 
appearances  whatever  are  infallible  proofs  of 
grace.  Our  practice  is  the  only  sure  evi- 
dence that  we  are  genuinely  Christians." ! 
This  is  the  criterion  of  a  modern  philos- 
opher ;  but  it  is  also  the  criterion  of  the  New 
Testament.  In  religion  it  is  never  the 
mechanism  of  a  process,  but  always  the  ulti- 
mate meaning  of  the  process  which  is  the 
really  significant  thing.  The  value  of  con- 
version— let  it  be  said  with  all  possible  plain- 
ness— depends  not  on  how  it  happens,  but 
on  what  it  effects.  If  finally  it  "  have  a  life 
to  show,"  there  is  no  further  need  of  argu- 
ment ;  it  has  justified  itself. 

In  applying  this  practical-utility  test  we 
must  endeavour  to  state  the  question  with 
perfect  fairness.     It  may  be  said  that  relig- 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  20.  "  Im- 
mediate luminousness,  philosophical  reasonableness  and  moral 
helpfulness"  says  the  same  vigorous  writer, "  are  the  only  availa- 
ble criteria.  Saint  Teresa  might  have  had  the  nervous  system  of 
the  placidest  cow  and  it  would  not  now  save  her  theology  if  the 
trial  of  the  theology  by  those  other  tests  should  show  it  to  be 
contemptible.  And,  conversely,  if  her  theology  can  stand 
those  other  tests,  it  will  make  no  difference  how  hysterical  or 
nervously  off  her  balance  Saint  Teresa  may  have  been  when 
she  was  with  us  here  below." 


60  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

ious  experiences  which  have  little  or  nothing 
in  common  with  those  described  in  the 
previous  lecture,  nevertheless  yield  results 
which  will  bear  comparison  with  the  best 
that  these  can  show.  This  is,  of  course, 
true — and  I  may  remind  you  of  the  em- 
phatic repudiation  which  has  already  been 
made  of  any  claim  to  spiritual  superiority  for 
one  particular  type  of  experience x — but  it  is 
not  to  the  point.  The  question  is  not 
whether  some  other  kind  of  experience  bears 
good  fruit,  but  whether  this  kind  bears  it ;  if 
it  does,  the  reality  of  conversion  as  a  fact 
for  life  is  established ;  it  has  absolute  value  ; 
what  may  be  its  relative  value  is  another 
question. 

If  it  bears  fruit,  I  say  ;  but  does  it  ?  This 
is  the  question  to  which  we  must  now  turn 
our  attention. 

I 

As  in  the  preceding  lecture,  so  in  this,  the 
appeal  will  be  to  fact,  and  I  shall  not  hesitate 
once  more  to  make  very  liberal  use  of  con- 
crete   illustrations.      But  before  coming  to 

»See  p.  1 8. 


AS  A  FACT  FOR   LIFE  6 1 

these  we  may  spend  a  minute  or  two  in 
listening  to  the  testimony  of  two  or  three 
witnesses  whom  no  one  will  suspect  of  un- 
due bias  in  favour  of  evangelical  Christi- 
anity. 

I  have  already  quoted  some  significant 
words  of  the  late  Prof.  Romanes  concern- 
ing conversion ; l  but  the  most  significant 
are  still  to  come  :  "  In  all  cases,"  he  says, 
"  it  is  not  a  mere  change  of  belief  or  opinion ; 
this  is  by  no  means  the  point ;  the  point  is 
that  it  is  a  modification  of  character  more  or 
less  profound." 

Prof.  James  is  even  more  explicit :  "  The 
best  fruits  of  religious  experience,"  he 
declares,  "are  the  best  things  that  history 
has  to  show.  .  .  .  And  to  call  to  mind 
a  succession  of  such  examples  as  I  have 
lately  had  to  wander  through  [in  preparation 
for  his  lectures,  i.  e.,"]  is  to  feel  encouraged 
and  uplifted  and  washed  in  better  moral 
air."  2 

George  Eliot's  pen  was  not  usually  over- 

1  See  p.  50. 

8  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  259. 


62  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

flowing  with  generosity  when  she  wrote 
about  Evangelicalism ;  too  often,  indeed,  it 
was  dipped  in  gall.  But  there  were  things 
in  the  religious  world  about  her  which  even 
she  could  not  refuse  to  see,  as  her  sketch  of 
Milby  society  will  show  : 

"  Whatever  might  be  the  weaknesses  of 
the  ladies  who  pruned  the  luxuriances  of 
their  lace  and  ribbons,  cut  out  garments  for 
the  poor,  distributed  tracts,  quoted  Scripture, 
and  defined  the  true  Gospel,  they  had  learned 
this — that  there  was  a  divine  work  to  be  done 
in  life,  a  rule  of  goodness  higher  than  the 
opinion  of  their  neighbours  ;  and  if  the  no- 
tion of  a  heaven  in  reserve  for  themselves 
was  a  little  too  prominent,  yet  the  theory  of 
fitness  for  that  heaven  consisted  in  purity  of 
heart,  in  Christlike  compassion,  in  the  sub- 
duing of  selfish  desires.  They  might  give 
the  name  of  piety  to  much  that  was  only 
puritanic  egoism ;  they  might  call  many 
things  sin  that  were  not  sin  ;  but  they  had  at 
least  the  feeling  that  sin  was  to  be  avoided 
and  resisted,  and  colour  blindness,  which  may 
mistake  drab  for  scarlet,  is  better  than  total 


AS   A  FACT  FOR   LIFE  63 

blindness,  which  sees  no  distinction  of  colour 
at  all.  Miss  Rebecca  Linnet,  in  quiet  attire, 
with  a  somewhat  excessive  solemnity  of 
countenance,  teaching  at  the  Sunday-school, 
visiting  the  poor,  and  striving  after  a  standard 
of  purity  and  goodness,  had  surely  more 
moral  loveliness  than  in  those  flaunting  peony- 
days,  when  she  had  no  other  model  than  the 
costumes  of  the  heroines  in  the  circulating 
library.  Miss  Eliza  Pratt,  listening  in  rapt 
attention  to  Mr.  Tryan's  evening  lecture,  no 
doubt  found  evangelical  channels  for  vanity 
and  egoism  ;  but  she  was  clearly  in  advance 
of  Miss  Phipps  giggling  under  her  feathers 
at  old  Mr.  Crewe's  peculiarities  of  enuncia- 
tion. And  even  elderly  fathers  and  mothers, 
with  minds,  like  Mrs.  Linnet's,  too  tough  to 
imbibe  much  doctrine,  were  the  better  for 
having  their  hearts  inclined  towards  the  new 
preacher  as  a  messenger  from  God.  They 
became  ashamed,  perhaps,  of  their  evil  tem- 
pers, ashamed  of  their  worldliness,  ashamed 
of  their  trivial,  futile  past.  The  first  condition 
of  human  goodness  is  something  to  love ;  the 
second,  something  to  reverence.     And  this 


64  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

latter  precious  gift  was  brought  to  Milby  by 
Mr.  Tryan  and  Evangelicalism."  l 

"  I  can  assure  my  incredulous  literary 
friends,"  writes  that  great  master  of  English 
prose,  Mark  Rutherford,  "that  years  ago  it 
was  not  uncommon  for  men  and  women  sud- 
denly to  awake  to  the  fact  that  they  had  been 
sinners,  and  to  determine  that  henceforth 
they  would  keep  God's  commandments  by 
the  help  of  Jesus  Christ  and  the  Holy  Spirit. 
What  is  more  extraordinary  is  that  they  did 
keep  God's  commandments  for  the  rest  of 
their  lives."2 

II 

Statements  of  this  kind  coming  from  such 
witnesses  can  hardly  fail  to  interest  us,  but 
personal  conviction  of  the  reality  of  conver- 
sion can  be  reached  only  by  getting  behind 
all  generalizations  to  the  hard  facts  them- 
selves. This  is  what  we  must  now  seek  to 
do.  The  rough  system  of  grouping  which 
for  convenience  sake  I  adopt  any  one  may 

1  Janet's  Repentance,  Ch.  X. 
1  Catharine  Furze,  p.  358. 


AS   A  FACT   FOR   LIFE  65 

fill  out  in  further  detail  from  his  own  reading 
and  observation. 

(1)  The  facts  most  obvious  and  most 
readily  available  and  constituting  perhaps 
the  largest  class  are  those  which  illustrate 
the  power  of  conversion  to  free  men  from  the 
chains  of  evil  habit  and  in  many  cases  com- 
pletely to  annul  the  baser  temptations  of  our 
nature.  Of  this  there  is  no  better  nor  better 
known  example  than  that  of  Colonel  Gar- 
diner. The  story  of  his  remarkable  conver- 
sion, as  told  by  Doddridge,  is  too  familiar  to 
need  repetition  here ;  it  will  be  sufficient  for 
my  purpose  to  quote  the  Colonel's  own  testi- 
mony to  its  immediate  effect  upon  his  life : 
"  I  was,"  he  says,  "  effectually  cured  of  all 
inclination  to  that  sin  I  was  so  strongly  ad- 
dicted to,  that  I  thought  nothing  but  shoot- 
ing me  through  the  head  could  have  cured 
me  of  it ;  and  all  desire  and  inclination  to  it 
were  removed  as  entirely  as  if  I  had  been  a 
sucking  child  ;  nor  did  the  temptation  return 
to  this  day."  "  I  have  heard  the  Colonel  fre- 
quently say,"  reports  another  witness,  "  that 
he  was  much  addicted  to  impurity  before  his 


66  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

acquaintance  with  religion  ;  but  that,  so  soon 
as  he  was  enlightened  from  above,  he  felt  the 
power  of  the  Holy  Ghost  changing  his  nature 
so  wonderfully,  that  his  sanctification  in  this 
respect  seemed  more  remarkable  than  in  any 
other."  l 

But  perhaps  the  most  remarkable  results  of 
conversion  under  this  head  are  to  be  found 
in  the  cases  of  reformed  drunkards ;  and 
among  these  I  know  of  none  more  striking 
than  that  of  an  Oxford  graduate,  the  son  of 
a  clergyman,  whose  story  is  given  among 
the  conversion  documents  collected  by  Prof. 
J.  H.  Leuba  and  printed  in  the  American 
Journal  of  Psychology?  Omitting  many  de- 
tails, the  essential  facts,  given  in  the  writer's 
own  words,  are  these:  "I  was  intended 
from  babyhood  for  the  ministry,  and  had  a 
grammar  school  and  university  career,  grad- 
uating in  Arts  at  Oxford  in  1880.  At  fifteen 
I  was  a  confirmed  smoker,  and  used  to  get 
drunk  often  without  the  master  being  aware 
of  it.     At   eighteen   I  was   sent  to  another 

1  Quoted  in  Doddridge's  Life  of  Gardiner. 
a  Vol.  VII,  p.  373. 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  67 

school.  Here  all  the  older  boys,  with  one  or 
two  exceptions,  were  habitual  drinkers,  if  not 
drunkards.  About  two  and  a  half  years  of 
this  brought  me  up  to  the  age  at  which  I 
should  enter  my  university  career.  I  went 
to  Oxford  and  gained  my  scholarship  in  the 
usual  way.  A  reckless,  drunken  and  other- 
wise impure  life  passed  by  quickly  enough, 
and  I  found  myself  a  graduate,  ready,  as  my 
poor  father  thought,  to  take  orders  at  once. 
Alas !  nothing  was  further  from  my  mind 
than  the  ministry.  I  knew  absolutely  noth- 
ing of  God.  Between  the  period  of  leaving 
Oxford  and  my  conversion,  I  never  darkened 
the  door  of  my  father's  church,  although  I 
lived  with  him  for  eight  years,  making  what 
money  I  wanted  by  journalism,  and  spend- 
ing it  in  high  carousal  with  any  one  who 
would  sit  with  me  and  drink  it  away.  So  I 
lived,  and  would  probably  have  gone  on  liv- 
ing, had  not  God  turned  me  around  and  com- 
pelled me  to  go  on  another  road.  ...  I 
was  converted  in  my  own  bedroom  in  my 
father's  rectory  house  at  precisely  three 
o'clock  in  the  afternoon  of  a  hot  July  day. 


68  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

A  young  lady  friend  sent  me  a  copy  of 
Drummond's  Natural  Law  in  the  Spiritual 
World,  asking  me  my  opinion  of  it  as  a  lit- 
erary work  only.  Being  proud  of  my  critical 
talents,  and  wishing  to  enhance  myself  in  my 
new  friend's  esteem,  I  took  the  book  to  my 
bedroom,  for  quiet,  intending  to  give  it  a 
thorough  study,  and  then  write  to  her  what  I 
thought  of  it.  It  was  here  that  God  met  me 
face  to  face.  .  .  .  No  words  were  spoken 
to  me ;  my  soul  seemed  to  see  my  Saviour 
in  the  spirit,  and  I  rejoiced  there  and  then  in 
a  conversion  so  astounding  that  the  whole 
village  heard  of  it  in  less  than  twenty-four 
hours." 

Thus  far  the  story  might  have  been  included 
among  those  given  in  the  last  lecture  in  proof  of 
the  reality  of  conversion  as  a  fact  of  conscious- 
ness.    Now  for  its  value  as  a  fact  for  life : 

"  The  day  after  my  conversion  I  went  into 
the  hay-field  to  lend  a  hand  with  the  harvest, 
and  came  home  drunk.  Next  morning  I  was 
very  low  indeed ;  still  I  felt  that  God  was  not 
going  to  lift  me  up  like  that  and  then  let  me 
fall  into  lower  depths  at  once.     About  mid- 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  69 

day  I  made  on  my  knees  the  first  prayer  be- 
fore God  for  twenty  years.  From  that  hour 
drink  has  had  no  terrors  for  me;  I  never 
touch  it,  never  want  it.  So  with  every  known 
sin,  the  deliverance  in  each  case  being  per- 
manent and  complete.  I  have  had  no  temp- 
tations since  conversion,  God  seemingly 
having  shut  out  Satan  from  that  course  with 
me ;  he  gets  a  free  hand  in  another  way,  but 
never  on  sins  of  the  flesh." 

It  is  not  of  course  every  day  that  such  a 
narrative  finds  its  way  into  print ;  yet  what- 
ever incredulous  persons,  literary  or  other- 
wise, may  think,  transformations  as  sudden, 
as  complete,  and  as  permanent,  are  contin- 
ually taking  place  as  the  direct  result  of  con- 
version. Prof.  James  quotes  the  saying  of 
a  medical  man  who  declared  that  the  only 

I  radical  remedy  he  knew  for  dipsomania  was 
religio-mania.1  Mr.  S.  H.  Hadley  says  that 
he  has  seen  men  who  had  gone  the  round  of 
various  institutions,  and  tried  every  other 
means  all  to  no  purpose,  instantly  cured  by 
Christ    alone,    and    never   touch    or  want  a 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  268,  note. 


70  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

drink  till  their  dying  day.1  But  the  most 
significant  testimony  of  recent  years  is  to  be 
found  in  a  volume  in  the  "  Contemporary 
Science  Series,"  published  only  last  year 
(1907),  The  Psychology  of  Alcoholism,  by 
Dr.  G.  B.  Cutten.  The  tenth  chapter  of  the 
book  is  entitled  "  Religious  Conversion  as  a 
Cure."  The  author,  it  will  be  remembered, 
is  not  a  theologian  but  a  scientist,  and  here 
are  some  of  the  things  he  says.  First,  he 
quotes  from  the  report  of  a  meeting  in  1901 
of  the  New  York  Academy  of  Medicine.  At 
this  meeting,  which  was  attended  by  special- 
ists who  had  had  considerable  experience  in 
dealing  with  alcoholic  cases,  neither  drugs 
nor  medicines  were  mentioned  as  possible 
cures.  Two  cures  only  were  named ;  one 
was  hypnotism,  and  the  other  religious  con- 
version. One  of  the  speakers — a  specialist, 
Dr.  Starr, — confessed  that  the  only  reformed 
drunkards  of  whom  he  had  knowledge,  were 
those  who  had  been  saved,  not  through 
medical  but  through  religious  influence.  Dr. 
Cutten  does  not  go  so  far  as  to  exclude  all 

1  Down  in  Water  Street,  p.  20 1. 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  7 1 

other  cures,  but  he  agrees  with  Dr.  Starr 
in  regarding  religious  conversion  as  the  most 
effective  cure.  "  Were  it  desirable,"  he  says, 
"  the  Church  could  eclipse  the  patent  medi- 
cine advertisers  with  the  thousands  of  testi- 
monials which  might  be  produced  by  alcohol- 
ics cured  by  religious  conversions."  He 
quotes  another  medical  authority  as  saying 
that  were  we  not  used  to  the  phenomena  of 
religious  revivals,  the  force  of  reforming 
energy  kwhich  they  bring  with  them  would 
strike  us  as  little  short  of  miraculous,  and, 
finally,  he  declares  that  in  the  opinions  thus 
expressed  of  the  value  of  conversion  most 
authorities  on  alcoholism  concur. 

Facts  like  these  may  well  make  the  most 
hardened  sceptic  rub  his  eyes;  but  among 
patient  workers  in  our  great  city  missions, 
though  they  will  be  read  with  quiet  thankful- 
ness, they  will  create  no  surprise  ;  they  know 
that  thus  has  it  been  from  the  beginning: 
"  He  breaks  the  power  of  cancelled  sin."  Of 
all  words  that  the  hand  of  man  ever  penned, 
in  the  Bible  or  out  of  it,  I  know  of  none  with 
such    strange  power  to  move  the  heart  as 


72  THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

those  of  St.  Paul  to  the  Corinthians  :  "  Forni- 
cators, idolaters,  adulterers,  thieves,  covetous, 
drunkards,  revilers,  extortioners — and  such 
were  some  of  you  :  but  ye  were  washed,  ye 
were  sanctified,  ye  were  justified  in  the  name 
of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  and  in  the  Spirit  of 
our  God."  l 

(2)  But  the  fruits  of  conversion — its  value 
as  a  fact  for  life — are  to  be  seen  not  only  in 
the  changed  lives  of  downright  evil  men,  but 
in  the  difference  it  has  made  in  men  whose 
lives  were  always  outwardly  irreproachable. 
Indeed,  Mr.  R.  H.  Hutton  comments  on  the 
curious  fact,  as  he  thinks  it,  that  the  high 
doctrine  of  conversion,  though  it  may  have 
won  its  greatest  number  of  apparent  triumphs 
over  persons  of  Colonel  Gardiner's  type,  "  has 

1 1  Cor.  6  :  10,  IX.  "  It  seems  to  me,"  says  Dean  Church, 
"  that  the  exultation  apparent  in  early  Christian  literature, 
beginning  with  the  Apostolic  Epistles,  at  the  prospect  now  at 
length  disclosed  within  the  bounds  of  a  sober  hope,  of  a  great 
moral  revolution  in  human  life, — that  the  rapturous  confidence 
which  pervades  these  Christian  ages,  that  at  last  the  routine 
of  vice  and  sin  has  met  its  match,  that  a  new  and  astonishing 
possibility  has  come  within  view,  that  men,  not  here  and  there, 
but  on  a  large  scale,  might  attain  to  that  hitherto  hopeless  thing 
to  the  multitudes,  goodness, — is  one  of  the  most  singular  and 
solemn  things  in  history."   {The  Gifts  of  Civilization,  p.  156.) 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  73 

derived  all  its  authority  from  men  of  a  very 
different  type  indeed,  men  like  St.  Paul  and 
John  Wesley,  whose  whole  life  has  been  in 
some  sense  profoundly  religious,  and  in  whom 
the  convulsive  change  called  conversion,  has 
represented  not  a  change  from  a  life  of  reck- 
less pleasure  or  license  to  a  life  of  faith,  but 
only  a  change  from  one  type  of  faith  to  an- 
other type  of  faith."  1  A  later  writer  in  the 
Spectator2  goes  still  further:  What  need, 
he  asks,  could  such  a  man  as  Wesley  have 
of  conversion?  Well,  but,  setting  all  else 
aside,  is  it  not  manifest  that  but  for  that 
golden  hour  on  May  24th,  1738,  there 
would  have  been  no  world-wide  Methodism, 
the  eighteenth  century  would  have  lost  one 
of  its  greatest  names?  The  Wesley  whom 
we  know,  the  man  who  turned  England  up- 
side down  and  left  his  mark  deep  and  broad 
over  the  whole  English-speaking  world,  was 
(as  he  himself  always  affirmed)  the  child 
of  the  great  experience  which  came  to  him  in 

'"The     Metaphysics    of      Conversion,"    in     Contemporary 
Thought  and  Thinkers,  Vol.  I,  p.  369. 
•In  an  article,  "Christianity  and  Conversion,"  Sept.  8,  1906. 


74  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

the  little  room  in  Aldersgate  Street.  The 
same  is  true  of  Thomas  Chalmers  and  the 
Apostle  Paul.  "  Chalmers  in  his  early  days 
preached  morals  alone,  and  with  no  moral 
result.  He  became  rilled  with  the  love  of 
Christ  and  with  that  power  behind  him  en- 
graved the  ethical  precepts  on  the  heart  of 
Scotland."1  Saul  of  Tarsus  was  a  gifted 
young  rabbi  who  would  doubtless  have  made 
for  himself  a  name  among  his  own  people ;  yet, 
but  for  that  which  happened  on  the  Damascus 
road,  none  would  remember  him  to-day,  the 
world's  history  would  run  in  other  channels. 

(3)  In  multitudes,  too,  distinguished  from 
their  fellows  neither  by  a  bad  preeminence  in 
evil  nor  by  any  far-shining  gifts  of  intellect, 
conversion  has  been  the  door  into  a  fuller  and 
richer  life  both  mental  and  moral.  The  late 
Hugh  Price  Hughes's  biographer  tells  us  that 
his  conversion  was  "  the  prelude  of  a  singular 
bursting  forth  of  his  mental  powers.  The 
opening  of  the  doors  of  the  spirit  was  also 
that  of  the  mind." 2     This  has  been,  if  not,  as 

1  The  Eternal  Religion,  p.  102,  by  J.  Brierley. 

*  Life  of  Hugh  Price  Hughes,  by  his  Daughter,  p.  31. 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  75 

Hughes  himself  was  wont  in  after  life  to  in- 
sist, the  normal,  at  least,  a  very  common  ex- 
perience in  the  lives  of  humble  and  unedu- 
cated men  and  women:  the  quickening  of 
the  spiritual  life  has  broken  up  the  deep 
slumber  of  the  mind  and  set  ajar  its  long- 
closed  doors.  The  supreme  illustration  of 
this  on  the  large  scale  is  to  be  found  in  Wes- 
ley's wonderful  Journals,  and  in  the  tireless 
zeal  with  which  he  laboured  to  satisfy  the  de- 
mands of  the  hunger  and  thirst  after  knowl- 
edge which  he  himself  had  done  so  much 
to  create.  It  is  worthy  of  note,  too,  that 
Moody's  great  educational  institutions,  which 
have  done  so  much  for  the  widening  of  the 
outlook  of  thousands  of  humble  Christian 
workers  all  over  the  North  American  conti- 
nent, were  the  immediate  outcome  of  his  fer- 
vent evangelism. 

Should  not  the  great  access  of  human  glad- 
ness which  conversion  has  brought  into 
life  also  be  reckoned  unto  it  for  righteous- 
ness ?  John  Bunyan,  eager  to  talk  to  the 
very  crows  that  sat  upon  the  ploughed  lands 
of  the  mercy  of  God  to  him ;  John  Wesley, 


76  THE  REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

changed  from  a  convict  seeking  to  shorten 
his  sentence  by  good  conduct  into  a  free  man 
rejoicing  in  his  freedom  ;  Billy  Bray,  the  "  ex- 
cellent little  illiterate  English  evangelist "  of 
Prof.  James's  Lectures,  hearing  one  foot 
say  "  Glory  "  and  the  other  answer  "  Amen," 
all  the  time  that  he  is  walking — these  are  but 
three  in  a  vast  and  happy  throng  of  human 
souls  around  whom  there  gathers,  like  a  radi- 
ant, fostering,  cheering  air,  the  abundant  joy 
of  faith  and  hope  and  love  and  praise.  When 
Moody  and  Sankey  left  Birmingham  at  the 
close  of  the  mission  referred  to  in  the  previ- 
ous lecture,1  Dr.  Dale  declared  that  some  of 
the  most  remarkable  results  of  their  visit  were 
to  be  found  among  those  who  had  long  been 
members  of  Christian  Churches.  "  I  hardly 
know,"  he  said,  "  how  to  describe  the  change 
which  has  passed  over  them.  It  is  like 
the  change  which  comes  upon  a  landscape 
where  clouds  which  have  been  hanging  over 
it  for  hours  suddenly  vanish  and  the  sunlight 
seems  to  fill  both  heaven  and  earth.  There 
is  a  joyousness  and  an  elasticity  of  spirit,  and 

1  See  p.  47. 


fc1 


AS  A   FACT   FOR   LIFE  77 

a  hopefulness,  which  have  completely  trans- 
formed them."  1  A  London  journalist  who 
was  once  told  off  to  report  for  a  daily  paper 
the  proceedings  of  an  immense  gathering  of 
members  of  the  Salvation  Army  drawn  from 
all  parts  of  the  world,  declared  that  what  im- 
pressed him  above  everything  else  was  the 
crowd's  quenchless  rejoicing;  never  before 
had  he  found  himself  in  the  midst  of  such  a 
throng  of  happy  human  faces.  Now  I  ven- 
ture to  say  that  gladness  such  as  this,  pass- 
ing though  it  may  be,  is  no  mean  part  of 
this  world's  good.  And  if  it  be  true,  as  Rob- 
ert Louis  Stevenson  tells  us,  that  there  is  no 
duty  we  so  much  underrate  as  the  duty  of 
being  happy,  that  the  goodness  of  God  knocks 
at  our  sullen  heart  in  vain,  then  a  religious 
experience  which  has  power  thus  to  stab  the 
spirit  broad  awake  is  a  fact  for  life  of  the 
most  real  kind. 

Or,  look  at  the  more  tangible  results,  in 
the  shape  of  difficult  right  deeds,  for  which 
after  conversion,  men  and  women  have 
found  themselves  sufficient.     To  one  class  of 

1  Article  quoted  above,  p.  380. 


78  THE   REALITY  OF   CONVERSION 

the  facts  only  can  I  now  refer.  Restitution, 
it  will  be  freely  admitted,  is  one  of  the  most 
difficult  of  human  duties;  perhaps  nothing 
in  our  eyes  witnesses  more  conclusively  to 
the  working  of  a  new  spirit  within  a  man 
than  his  resolve,  at  all  costs,  to  confess,  and 
as  far  as  may  be,  to  repair  an  ancient  wrong. 
Now,  with  instances  of  this  kind  our  conver- 
sion records  abound.  Here  is  one  from 
Prof.  Leuba's  collection  :  "At  a  meeting  I 
offered  myself  voluntarily  for  service  to  God. 
Quicker  than  thought  the  Spirit  admonished 
me  that  I  had  wronged  a  man  and  I  must 
confess  and  right  that  wrong.  I  had  an 
awful  struggle  with  myself  for  a  year.  Every 
time  I  prayed  this  thing  would  come  up.  I 
debated  with  myself  and  with  the  Lord  and 
tried  to  convince  myself  that  I  need  not  do 
this.  I  saw  no  way  out  of  it,  nor  how  to 
make  right  the  wrong,  as  I  was  strapped 
with  debts,  and  prospects  were  very  gloomy. 
God  at  last  gave  me  the  grace  and  courage 
to  overcome  my  pride  and  write  to  the  man;" 
and  in  the  end  full  restoration  was  made. 
Here   is   another  example  from  Mr.  S.  H. 


AS  A   FACT   FOR   LIFE  79 

Hadley's  experience :  "  Brother  Hadley," 
said  one  of  the  Water  Street  converts  to  him 
one  day,  "  the  devil  is  after  me  ;  I  robbed  the 
poor  box  of  ten  dollars  in  the  old  life,  and  the 
devil  tells  me  that  because  '  I  done  time  for  it,' 
it  is  mine,  but  Jesus  says  \  No,  pay  it  back,'" 
and  he  handed  him  five  two  dollar  bills.1  A 
still  more  striking  illustration  is  given  in  one 
of  Henry  Drummond's  addresses  to  students  : 
"  I  knew  a  man  who  led  a  woman  astray. 
He  was  fast  and  evil  then,  but  a  year  or  two 
after  he  was  changed  and  became  what  he  is 
— one  of  the  most  prominent  men  in  the  re- 
ligious world.  But  through  all  his  success 
and  apparent  blessings  there  was  the  stain 
and  the  shadow  of  that  woman's  life  upon  him. 
Only  three  people  ever  knew  about  it,  and  it 
was  twenty  years  ago.  He  preached  all 
through  England  and  Scotland  and  Ireland 
in  the  hope,  I  fervently  believe,  that  that 
woman  might  hear  him  and  be  saved. 
Every  prayer  he  prayed  he  prayed  for  her. 
Not  long  ago  I  was  in  London  at  a  meeting 
which  he  was  addressing  and  after  the  meet- 

1  Down  hi  Water  Street,  p.  131. 


80  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

ing  a  woman  walked  up  to  him  with  bent 
head,  weeping.  I  saw  them  alone  as  they 
stood.  That  was  the  woman  he  had  searched 
for  in  the  restitution  of  twenty  years."  !  If 
then — and  illustrations  of  this  kind  might  be 
multiplied  almost  indefinitely — conversion 
can  after  this  fashion  prove  itself  a  power 
which  makes  for  righteousness,  for  the 
straightening  out  of  the  twisted  strands  of 
life,  may  we  not  once  more  insist  upon  its 
significance  as  a  fact  for  life  ? 

(4)  Thus  far  we  have  sought  for  the  fruits 
of  conversion,  for  the  most  part,  in  the  life  of 
the  individual.  The  facts  are  not  less  arrest- 
ing when  we  turn  to  the  history  of  communities 
and  nations.  We  are  sometimes  told  that 
the  next  revival  will  be  ethical  ;  and  it  is  de- 
voutly to  be  wished  that  the  prophets  may 
prove  right,  for  an  ethical  revival  is  always 
needed.  But  if  the  implication  is  that  the 
revivals  of  the  past  have  not  been  ethical,  it 
is  necessary  to  protest.  Every  great  relig- 
ious awakening  has  set  forward,  in  the  largest 
meaning  of  the  word,   the  salvation  of  the 

1  See  G.  A.  Smith's  Life  of  Henry  Drummond,  p.  479. 


AS   A  FACT   FOR   LIFE  8l 

people ;  it  has  given  them  a  keener  moral 
vision,  a  more  vigorous  conscience,  higher 
ideals  both  of  private  and  of  public  duty  ;  and 
it  has  set  free  some  of  the  mightiest  and 
most  enduring  of  all  the  forces  which  to-day- 
are  making  for  social  well-being  and  national 
righteousness.  This  is  the  verdict  which  the 
facts  justify  and  demand.  Thus,  e.g.,  it  was 
the  unanimous  testimony  of  all  observers 
during  the  recent  revival  in  Wales  that  not 
only  were  all  the  grosser  vices  reduced  to 
the  vanishing  point,  but  the  subtler  sins  of 
unforgiving  rancour,  non-payment  of  debts, 
dishonest  work  were  abated.  In  nothing 
was  the  leader  of  the  movement  clearer  and 
more  emphatic  than  in  his  insistence  that  in- 
juries must  be  forgiven  and  debts  must  be 
paid.1  Besides  the  hosts  of  rejoicing  con- 
verts with  which  Moody's  work  in  Great 
Britain  filled  all  the  Churches,  there  sprang 
up  in  its  track  a  multitude  of  charities,  phi- 
lanthropies, associations,  whose  helping,  heal- 
ing ministry  has  not  ceased  to  this  day. 
Henry    Drummond  did  not  hesitate  to  say 

'See  Mr.  Stead's  pamphlet  referred  to  above,  p.  6l. 


82  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

that  in  Scotland,  so  far-reaching  was,  and  is, 
the  influence  of  that  work,  that  any  one  who 
knows  the  inner  religious  history  of  the 
country  must  regard  this  time  as  nothing 
short  of  a  national  epoch.1 

The  same  watchful  solicitude  for  the  moral 
ahd  social  obligations  of  religion  marked  the 
"Great  Awakening"  in  New  England  under 
Jonathan  Edwards :  "  Because  of  God's 
great  goodness  and  His  gracious  presence  in 
the  town  of  Northampton  during  the  late 
spiritual  revival," — so  runs  in  substance  the 
preamble  to  the  Covenant  which  Edwards 
drew  up  and  which  the  people  of  Northamp- 
ton subscribed — "  the  people  present  them- 
selves before  the  Lord,  to  renounce  their  evil 
ways  and  to  put  away  their  abominations  be- 
fore His  eyes.  They  solemnly  promise  and 
vow  before  the  Lord,  in  all  their  concerns 
with  their  neighbour,  to  have  a  strict  regard 
to  rules  of  honesty,  justice,  and  uprightness  ; 
not  to  overreach  or  defraud  him  in  any  mat- 
ter, or,  either   wilfully   or   through  want  of 

1  Dwight  L.  Moody,  p.  81.  See  also  G.  A.  Smith's  chapter 
on  "  The  Great  Mission." 


AS  A  FACT  FOR   LIFE  83 

care  to  injure  him  in  any  of  his  honest  posses- 
sions or  rights  ;  and  to  have  a  tender  respect, 
not  only  to  their  own  interest,  but  to  his  ;  and 
particularly  never  to  give  him  cause  of  of- 
fense by  wilfully  or  negligently  forbearing  to 
pay  their  just  debts  ;  whenever  they  may  be 
conscious  of  having  in  the  past  wronged 
their  neighbour  in  his  outward  estate,  never 
to  rest  till  they  have  made  that  restitution 
which  the  rules  of  moral  equity  require. 
They  promise  to  avoid  all  backbiting,  evil 
speaking  and  slandering,  as  also  everything 
that  feeds  a  spirit  of  bitterness  or  ill-will,  or 
secret  grudge ;  not  to  ridicule  a  neighbour's 
failings,  or  needlessly  insist  on  his  faults ;  to 
do  nothing  in  a  spirit  of  revenge.  And 
further,  they  will  not  allow  their  private  in- 
terest or  honour  or  the  desire  for  victory 
against  a  contrary  party  to  lead  them  into 
any  course  of  which  their  consciences  would 
reproach  them  as  hurtful  to  religion  or  the 
interests  of  Christ's  kingdom  ;  and  particu- 
larly, in  public  affairs,  not  to  allow  the  in- 
terest of  party  or  the  desire  of  worldly  am- 
bition to  lead  them  counter  to  the  interests 


84  THE   REALITY   OF  CONVERSION 

of  true  religion.  Those  who  are  young 
promise  to  allow  themselves  in  no  diver- 
sions or  pastimes,  meetings  or  companies, 
which  would  hinder  a  devout  spirit  engaged 
in  religion,  to  avoid  everything  that  tends  to 
lasciviousness,  and  which  they  believe  will 
not  be  approved  by  the  infinitely  pure  and 
holy  eye  of  God.  They  finally  consecrate 
themselves  to  perform  with  great  watchful- 
ness the  duties  entailed  by  family  relation- 
ships, whether  parents  and  children,  hus- 
bands and  wives,  brothers  and  sisters,  mas- 
ters, mistresses  and  servants."  l 

Nor  was  John  Wesley  one  whit  behind  his 
great  Puritan  contemporary  in  his  stern  re- 
solve to  recognize  no  profession  of  conver- 
sion which  did  not  bear  fruit  in  life.  There 
is  a  very  instructive  incident  in  the  life  of 
John  Nelson,  one  of  the  early  Methodist 
preachers.  A  woman  whom  Nelson  had  dis- 
missed from  the  Society  about  twelve  months 
before  for  misbehaviour  stood  charged  at  the 
York  Assizes  with  a  capital  crime.     Nelson 

1 1  quote  from  Prof.  A.  V.  G.  Allen's  Jonathan  Edwards,  in 
the  ••  American  Religious  Leaders  "  series,  p.  156. 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  85 

being  at  that  time  in  the  York  Circuit  was 
subpoenaed  to  appear  at  the  Crown  bar  to  as- 
sign his  reasons  for  having  put  this  woman 
out  of  the  Methodist  Society.  Nelson  read 
the  Rules  of  the  Society  in  Court,  and  at  the 
end  of  that  rule  which  forbids  contracting  a 
debt  without  any  probability  of  being  able 
to  pay  it,  he  stopped  and  said,  "  My  lord, 
this  was  my  reason  for  dismissing  this 
woman  from  the  Society  to  which  I  belong." 
The  Judge  arose  and  said,  "  Good  morality, 
Mr.  Nelson ; "  and  then  being  seated  again 
desired  him  to  read  the  rest  of  the  rules. 
After  hearing  them,  his  lordship  said  em- 
phatically to  the  Court,  "Gentlemen,  this 
is  true  Christianity." !  When  Matthew 
Arnold 2  indulges  in  one  of  his  characteris- 
tic little  jibes  at  the  expense  of  a  company 
of  Cornish  revivalists  who,  he  says,  "will 
have  no  difficulty  in  tasting,  seeing,  hearing, 
and  feeling  God,  twenty  times  over,  to-night, 
and  yet  may  be  none  the  better  for  it  to-mor- 
row morning,"  he  may   be   saying  nothing 

1  The  Early  Methodist  Preachers,  Vol.  I,  p.  165. 

2  In  his  St.  Paul  and  Protestantism. 


86  THE   REALITY  OF  CONVERSION 

literally  inaccurate,  but  he  conveys  a  wholly 
untrue  and  unjust  impression  of  the  results 
of  religion  in  that  Methodist  county.  The 
Cornishman's  faith  has  made  him  every  way 
a  better  man,  and  I  shall  appeal  to  another 
English  man  of  letters  to  reverse  Arnold's 
unfavourable  judgment.  "  You  seem  a  very 
temperate  people  here,"  Mr.  Augustine  Bir- 
rell  once  observed  to  a  Cornish  miner  ;  "  how 
did  it  happen  ?  "  The  miner  replied,  solemnly 
raising  his  cap,  "  There  came  a  man  amongst 
us  once,  and  his  name  was  John  Wesley."  l 
But  there  is  no  need  of  further  witness. 
Wesley's  sound  English  sense,  his  strongly 
ethical  nature,  his  healthy  hatred  of  Anti- 
nomianism  in  all  its  forms  so  stamped  them- 
selves upon  the  whole  Evangelical  Revival 
that  to-day  writers  of  all  schools,  even  those 
who  are  furthest  removed  from  his  religious 
faith,  freely  acknowledge  the  greatness  of  the 
moral  revolution  which  he  wrought  in  the 
life  of  England.2 

1  Res  Judicata,  p.  129. 

2  See,  e.g.,  the  striking  tributes  of  John  Morley  {Nineteenth 
Century,  Feb.,  1892)  and  Goldwin  Smith  (CowJ>er,  «  English 
Men  of  Letters  "  series,  p.  45). 


AS  A  FACT  FOR   LIFE  87 

III 

The  truth  of  these  things  may  be  admitted ; 
indeed,  it  can  hardly  be  denied  ; l  but,  it  may 
be  urged,  there  is  much  else  to  be  taken  into 
account  before  we  finally  assess  the  value  of 
conversion  as  a  fact  for  life.  If  there  are 
real   are  there   not  also   sham  conversions  ? 

1  And  yet  it  has  been  denied  and  never  with  more  personal 
vehemence  than  in  that  recent  remarkable  autobiography 
Father  and  Son  :  "  After  my  long  experience,"  says  the  writer, 
"  I  have  surely  the  right  to  protest  against  the  untruth  (would 
that  I  could  apply  to  it  any  other  word ! )  that  evangelical  re- 
ligion or  any  religion  in  a  violent  form,  is  a  wholesome  or  val- 
uable or  desirable  adjunct  to  human  life.  It  divides  heart 
from  heart.  It  sets  up  a  vain,  chimerical  ideal  in  the  barren 
pursuit  of  which  all  the  tender,  indulgent  affections,  all  the  genial 
play  of  life,  all  the  exquisite  pleasures  and  soft  resignations  of 
the  body,  all  that  enlarges  and  calms  the  soul,  are  exchanged 
for  what  is  harsh  and  void  and  negative.  It  encourages  a 
stern  and  ignorant  spirit  of  condemnation;  it  throws  altogether 
out  of  gear  the  healthy  movement  of  the  conscience  ;  it  invents 
virtues  which  are  sterile  and  cruel ;  it  invents  sins  which  are 
no  sins  at  all,  but  which  darken  the  heaven  of  innocent  joy 
with  futile  clouds  of  remorse."  Those  who  have  followed  the 
writer's  painful  but  absorbing  story  will  not  be  altogether  un- 
prepared for  this  outburst  with  which  it  closes.  Much,  how- 
ever, as  we  may  sympathize  with  Mr.  Gosse,  it  is  none 
the  less  to  be  regretted  that  a  man  of  such  wide  reading  and 
catholic  tastes  did  not  remember  that  outside  the  little  world 
whose  narrow  ways  cramped  his  youthful  years,  there  lay 
another  world  where  men  live  under  a  larger  sky  and  breathe  a 
freer  air  and  with  a  better  right  to  name  themselves  "  evangel- 
ical." 


88  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

If  there  are  religious  experiences  under  which 
all  life  suffers  a  change  "  into  something  rich 
and  strange,"  are  there  not  others,  to  all  out- 
ward seeming  the  same,  which  work  no 
gracious  renewal  ?  Nay,  more,  is  it  not  a 
mournful  fact  that  the  worst  moral  failures 
are  sometimes  found  among  those  most  open 
to  religious  appeal,  that  it  is  sometimes  but 
a  very  short  step  from  the  most  intense  re- 
ligious emotion  to  the  fiercest  animal  pas- 
sion ?  These  things,  alas  !  are  so,  and  for  the 
Christian  Church  the  lesson  is  obvious :  she 
must  be  as  diligent  to  tnoralize  as  to  evangelize, 
as  patient  to  teach  as  she  is  eager  to  convert. 
Nevertheless,  though  the  moral  failures 
which  follow  on  the  back  of  conversion  were 
much  more  numerous  than  they  are,  the 
argument  of  this  lecture  would  remain  sub- 
stantially intact.  It  is  worthy  of  note,  by 
the  way,  that  Prof.  James  and  Prof.  Star- 
buck  are  both  thoroughgoing  optimists  con- 
cerning the  results  of  conversion.  All  the 
more  striking  instances  of  conversion  says 
the  former,  have  been  permanent.1     Starbuck, 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  257. 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  89 

after  investigating  a  hundred  cases,  came  to 
the  conclusion  that  "  the  effect  of  conversion 
is  to  bring  with  it  a  changed  attitude  towards 
life  which  is  fairly  constant  and  permanent,  al- 
though the  feelings  fluctuate."  "In  other 
words,  persons  who  have  passed  through  con- 
version, having  once  taken  a  stand  for  the  re- 
ligious life,  tend  to  feel  themselves  identified 
with  it,  no  matter  how  much  their  religious  en- 
thusiasm declines."  '  But  though  it  were  not 
so,  and  the  percentage  of  breakdowns  should 
turn  out  to  be  much  larger  than  the  psychol- 
ogists' rosy  estimate  allows  for,  we  should 
still  be  without  one  jot  or  tittle  of  excuse  for 
dismissing  the  subject  with  a  pitying  smile. 
"  Men  lapse  from  every  level — we  need  no 
statistics  to  tell  us  that."  But  it  is  the  rise 
rather  than  the  fall  which  is  the  spiritually 
significant  thing ;  it  is  in  it  we  get  the  true 
measure  of  the  divine  force  at  work  in  hu- 
man life  for  its  redemption.  And  even  when 
the  results  of  conversion  are  poor  and  disap- 
pointing, when  one  who  has  been  converted 
remains  on  a  lower  moral  plane  than  another 

1  The  Psychology  0/  Religion,  pp.  355-360. 


90  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

who  has  passed  through  no  such  experience, 
we  have  still  to  remember  what  the  one 
would  have  been  if  even  such  poor  grace  as 
he  has  received  had  never  touched  him  at 
all,  what  the  other  might  become  if  his 
larger,  richer  nature  were  visited  from  on 
high.  And,  finally,  however  conversion  has 
failed,  its  failures  do  not  cancel  its  achieve- 
ments ;  what  it  has  done  it  has  done ;  its 
record  stands  for  all  men  to  read ;  by  it,  it 
claims  and  is  content  to  be  judged. 

IV 

Again  I  ask,  what  shall  we  say  to  these 
things?  If  the  change  we  call  conversion 
reported  itself  only  to  my  own  individual 
consciousness,  then,  though  it  would  be  a  fact 
for  science  to  take  note  of  and  account  for — 
especially  since  the  witness  of  my  conscious- 
ness is  confirmed  by  that  of  multitudes 
around  me — its  significance  to  others  would 
be  of  a  wholly  different  kind  from  that  which 
belongs  to  it  when  it  comes  bearing  with  it 
such  outward  and  visible  signs.  It  is  signs 
such  as  these  which  are  Christianity's  one 


AS  A  FACT  FOR  LIFE  91 

answer  to  them  that  bear  witness  against  it. 
Through  age  after  age  it  stands  in  the 
world's  great  judgment  hall  and  cries  aloud, 
"  Believe  me  for  the  very  works'  sake  ; "  if 
that  plea  fails,  it  has  no  more  that  it  can  say. 
Men  do  indeed  speak  sometimes  of  "  prov- 
ing" Christianity,  as  if  it  were  a  kind  of 
mathematical  problem  through  which,  step 
by  step,  you  could  work  your  way  down  to 
the  triumphant  Q.  E.  D.  at  the  bottom.  But 
you  cannot  prove  Christianity;  Christianity 
must  prove  itself.  The  gospel,  Paul  says,  is 
a  power  of  God  ;  it  is  a  divine  force,  and 
therefore,  as  some  one  has  well  said,  its  proof 
must  be  not  logical  but  dynamical ;  it  is 
demonstrated  not  by  argument  but  by  what 
it  does.  When  John  sent  two  of  his  disciples 
to  Jesus,  saying,  "  Art  Thou  He  that  cometh, 
or  look  we  for  another?"  we  read  that 
Jesus  said — no,  we  do  not  read  that  Jesus 
said  anything  ;  what  we  read  is  this :  "In 
that  hour  He  cured  many  of  diseases  and 
plagues  and  evil  spirits ;  and  on  many  that 
were  blind  He  bestowed  sight."  Then  "  He 
answered  and  said  unto  them,  Go  your  way, 


92  THE   REALITY   OF   CONVERSION 

and  tell  John  what  things  ye  have  seen  and 
heard."  There  is  the  real,  silencing  answer ; 
not  in  persuasive  words  of  wisdom,  but  in 
demonstration  of  the  Spirit  and  of  power. 

I  am  not  afraid  to  trust  Christianity  any- 
where. It  will  hold  its  own  with  the  solitary 
thinker  in  his  study ;  it  will  stand  the  cross- 
fire of  experts  in  the  witness  box ;  it  will  state 
the  case  for  itself  on  paper  to  any  man  and 
await  without  fear  the  result.  But  if  we 
would  see  it  in  the  greatness  of  its  strength 
we  must  see  it  at  work.  While  it  only  ar- 
gues others  will  argue  back  again ;  when  it 
gets  to  work  it  puts  all  its  adversaries  to 
silence.  "And  seeing  the  man  which  was 
healed  standing  with  them,  they  could  say 
nothing  against  it."  Of  course  they  could 
not ;  the  God  that  answereth  by  healed  men, 
He  must  be  God.  It  is  easy — alas  1  that  it 
should  be  so  easy — for  men  like  Prof.  Hux- 
ley to  make  merry  over  certain  incidents 
in  the  gospel  story,  but  while  the  gospel  it- 
self remains  the  one  thing  on  earth  which  has 
power  to  cast  out  the  devils,  and  to  tame  the 
wild  lusts  and  passions  of  the  human  heart. 


AS   A   FACT   FOR   LIFE  93 

no  weapon  that  is  formed  against  it  can 
prosper. 

"  Saints  of  the  early  dawn  of  Christ, 

Saints  of  Imperial  Rome, 
Saints  of  the  cloistered  Middle  Age, 

Saints  of  the  modern  home ; 
Saints  of  the  soft  and  sunny  East, 

Saints  of  the  frozen  seas, 
Saints  of  the  isles  that  wave  their  palms 

In  the  far  Antipodes ; 
Saints  of  the  mart  and  busy  streets, 

Saints  of  the  squalid  lanes, 
Saints  of  the  silent  solitudes, 

Of  the  prairies  and  the  plains  ; 
Saints  who  were  wafted  to  the  skies 

In  the  torment  robe  of  flame, 
Saints  who  have  graven  on  men's  thoughts 

A  monumental  name ;  "  — 

compassed  about  with  so  great  a  cloud  of 
witnesses,  we  ask  again,  has  Christ  failed, 
or  can  Christianity  die  ? 


LECTURE  III 
VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION 


LECTURE  III 

VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION 

THE  preceding  lectures  have,  I  trust, 
helped  to  convince  us  that  we  are  in 
this  inquiry  in  contact  with  reality. 
But  if  they  have  done  this,  they  must  at  the 
same  time  have  done  more  :  they  must  have 
revealed  the  exceeding  variety  and  com- 
plexity of  the  facts  before  us.  It  is  enough 
to  mention  St.  Paul  and  St.  Augustine, 
Sampson  Staniforth  and  William  Cowper, 
the  miners  of  Cornwall  and  the  reclaimed 
drunkards  of  Water  Street,  to  show  what 
wide  reaches  of  religious  experience  are  cov- 
ered by  the  term  conversion.  For  one  man 
conversion  means  the  slaying  of  the  beast 
within  him ;  in  another  it  brings  the  calm  of 
conviction  to  an  unquiet  mind  ;  for  a  third  it 
is  the  entrance  into  a  larger  liberty  and  a  more 
abundant  life  ;  and  yet  again  it  is  the  gather- 
ing into  one  of  the  forces  of  a  soul  at  war 
within  itself.  The  late  Dr.  John  Watson — 
97 


98  VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION 

my  lamented  and  distinguished  predecessor 
in  this  lectureship — has  classified  conversions 
as  moral,  spiritual,  intellectual,  and  practical.1 
It  matters  comparatively  little  what  principle 
of  classification  we  adopt,  or  whether  we 
adopt  any  at  all — the  best  is  imperfect ; — what 
does  matter  is  that  we  steadfastly  resist  all 
attempts  to  "  standardize  "  conversion.  There 
are  types  of  conversion  to  which  many  do 
conform;  there  is  none  to  which  any  must 
conform.  There  is  but  one  Father's  house, 
but  it  is  reached  by  many  roads  ;  each  man 
must  travel  as  he  can,  and  no  man  must  dic- 
tate the  going  of  his  neighbour.  Attention 
has  been  drawn  in  a  previous  lecture  to  the 
striking  unity  which  underlies  the  many  mani- 
festations of  the  consciousness  of  salvation, 
alike  in  the  first  days  and  in  later  Chris- 
tian history.  In  the  present  lecture  our  aim 
will  be  to  note  the  not  less  striking  diversities 
of  form  in  which  the  conversion  experience 
reports  itself. 

1  In  a  sermon  on  "  Conversion  "  in  The  Inspiration  of  Our 
Faith.  See  also  the  chapter  on  "  Regeneration "  in  The 
Doctrines  of  Grace,  by  the  same  writer. 


VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION  99 

I 

If  we  were  to  make  careful  inquiry  into  the 
early  religious  history  of  the  members  of  an 
ordinary  evangelical  Christian  Church  to- 
day, we  should  probably  find  that  they  could 
be  divided  roughly  according  to  a  simple 
threefold  classification.  In  the  first  place, 
there  are  those  whom  F.  W.  Newman  calls 
the  "  once-born,"  1  children  of  God  from  their 
birth,  who  have  never  left  the  Father's  house, 
nor  ever  known  the  want  and  darkness  of  the 
far-off  country.  At  the  opposite  extreme  to 
these  are  those  whose  religious  life  began  in 
a  great  and  sudden  upheaval ;  they  are  the 
"  twice-born,"  and  to  them  the  day  of  their 
natural  birth  is  not  more  plainly  marked  in 
the  calendar  than  is  the  day  of  their  spiritual 
re-birth.  And,  finally,  between  these  two 
extremes,  at  various  points  along  the  line 
which  unites  them,  is  to  be  found  almost 
every  kind  of  religious  experience,  from  the 
long  and  slow  growth  of  some,  to  the  fierce, 
volcanic  outbursts  which  mark  the  life  of 
others. 

'See  The  Soul,  Ch.  III. 


IOO  VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION 

Of  the  first  of  these — the  "  once-born,"  as 
Newman  calls  them — it  does  not  fall  within 
the  province  of  these  lectures  to  speak,  and 
I  must  content  myself  with  an  expression  of 
regret  that  evangelical  Christianity  has  not 
been  more  ungrudging  in  its  recognition  of 
their  presence  among  us  and  of  their  stand- 
ing in  the  Christian  Church.  I  believe,  with 
Dr.  Dale,  that  the  Holy  Spirit's  action  on  the 
spiritual  nature  of  a  child  commences  very 
early,  and  that  where  He  is  not  resisted,  the 
work  of  renewal  is  as  gradual  as  the  unfold- 
ing of  any  of  the  higher  faculties  of  our 
nature.  If,  as  Dale  thinks,  "  renewal "  is  not 
the  right  word  to  use  in  such  a  case,  let  us 
say  that,  as  the  natural  life  develops,  the 
divine  Spirit  simply  crowns  and  perfects  it 
with  the  life  that  comes  from  God.  "  There 
are  not  a  few  who  can  testify  that  '  from  their 
childhood,'  they  knew,  not  '  the  Scriptures ' 
but  God  Himself ;  they  came  to  know  Him 
they  cannot  tell  how  ;  they  knew  Him  just 
as  they  knew  the  blue  sky  or  their  mother's 
love ;  they  knew  Him  before  they  could 
understand  any  name  by  which  in  our  im- 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  IOI 

perfect  human  speech  we  have  endeavoured 
to  affirm  His  goodness,  His  power,  or  His 
glory."  Probably,  too,  as  Dale  suggests,  the 
number  of  such  persons  might  be  indefinitely 
increased  if  we  did  not  imply  in  so  much  that 
we  say  to  them  that  they  belong  to  the 
devil  and  have  to  be  brought  to  Christ, 
while  the  truth  is,  that  they  belong  to  Christ 
and  have  to  be  kept  from  the  devil.1 

Our  immediate  concern,  however,  is  with 
those  varieties  of  the  conversion  experience 
which  would  entitle  their  possessors  to  a 
place  in  the  second  or  third  of  the  classes 
which  have  just  been  described.  And,  first, 
before  considering  any  of  our  later  records  it 
will  be  well  to  take  the  evidence  of  the  New 
Testament  itself 

II 

Among  the  first  believers,  says  Benjamin 
Jowett,  conversion  was  "  almost  always  sud- 
den";2  "sudden    conversions,"    says    Prof. 

1  In  a  series  of  papers  on  the  relation  of  children  to  the 
Church  in  The  Congregationalist,  1873. 

*  Essay  "  On  Conversion  and  Changes  of  Character  "  in  St. 
Paul's  Epistles  to  the  Thessalonians,  Galatians  and  Romans, 
Vol.  II,  p.  103. 


102  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

Leuba, "  seem  to  have  been  the  rule." '  And  of 
course  such  general  summaries  admit  of  easy 
if  partial,  justification.  It  is  easy,  too,  to  ex- 
plain (as  Jowett  does)  why,  in  the  circum- 
stances that  then  existed,  conversions  should 
have  been  for  the  most  part  sudden.  None 
the  less  we  shall  do  well  to  receive  such 
statements  with  caution.  >'"  St.  Paul  was  not 
the  only  man  to  be  converted  in  New  Testa- 
ment days.  Every  child  can  tell  the  story 
of  what  befel  on  the  Damascus  road  ;  but 
who  of  us  can  date  with  certainty  the  su- 
preme crisis  in  the  life  of  St.  Peter  ?  When 
we  remember  how  many  of  the  first  converts 
to  Christianity  were  gathered  from  among 
those  devout  persons,  who,  though  not  Jews 
themselves,  had  yet  found  in  Judaism  what 
the  old  and  dying  faiths  of  the  world  could 
not  give,  we  are  sure  there  must  have  been 
others  besides  young  Timothy  whose  con- 
version was  sudden  only  in  this  sense  that 
the  fruit  which  for  long  had  been  slowly  ri- 
pening fell  at  a  touch  into  the  husbandman's 
basket. 

Article  quoted  above,  p.  318. 


VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION  103 

But  even  if  we  allow  that  most  of  the  first 
Christians  were  brought  to  Christ  by  sudden 
conversion,  this  is  by  no  means  to  say  that 
the  New  Testament  presents  us  with  but  a 
single  type  of  conversion.  The  Acts  of  the 
Apostles  alone  should  be  sufficient  to  deliver 
us  from  the  tyranny  of  a  type.  Over  against 
the  story  of  Saul  of  Tarsus,  with  its  dazzling 
accompaniments  of  marvel  and  mystery — the 
voice  from  heaven,  the  light  above  the  bright- 
ness of  the  sun,  the  three  days  without  sight 
or  food,  or  drink — stands  the  simple  narrative 
of  the  Ethiopian  eunuch,  reading  the  Hebrew 
Scriptures  as  he  rode  in  his  chariot,  hearing 
the  truth  that  was  preached  to  him  by  Philip, 
and  greeting  it  with  eager  rejoicing.  It 
needed  the  roar  and  crash  of  the  earthquake, 
that  shook  the  foundations  of  his  prison 
house,  to  bring  conviction  to  the  soul  of  the 
Philippian  jailor;  but  in  the  same  city  was 
one  whose  heart  opened  to  her  Lord  without 
noise  or  violence,  as  when  day  breaks  over  a 
silent  summer  sea. 

There  is  a  still  further  suggestion  of  the 
diversity  of  the   Spirit's   operations   in   the 


104  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

variety  of  New  Testament  metaphor  by  which 
these  are  described.  The  most  familiar  is,  of 
course,  that  of  the  new  birth;  but  while  it 
would  be  sheer  pedantry,  or  worse,  to  com- 
plain of  the  prominence  which  Christian  the- 
ology has  always  given  to  this  term,  on  the 
other  hand,  it  may  not  be  out  of  place,  in 
justice  to  the  many-sidedness  of  the  scriptural 
conception  to  remind  ourselves  that  this  is 
not  the  only  figure  under  which  is  set  forth 
the  nature  of  the  change  wrought  in  man  by 
God.  Thus,  e.  g.t  it  is  described  as  a  resur- 
rection from  the  dead,  a  change  from  dark- 
ness to  light,  from  slavery  to  freedom,  or, 
still  more  simply,  as  conversion.1  There  is, 
as  Dr.  Newton  Clarke  says,2  good  reason  why 
regeneration  should  be  the  favourite  name 
for  describing,  from  the  divine  side,  the  be- 
ginning of  the  divine  life  in  man  ;  but  if  any 
man,  conscious  of  the  reality  of  the  change, 
finds  some  other  figure  truer  to  the  facts  of 
his  own  experience,  let  him  not   hesitate  to 

1  E.  g.,  Eph.  2  :  I ;  I  Pet.  2:9;  Rom.  6  :  22 ;  James  5  :  19. 
See  J.  B.  Mayor's  note  on  "  Regeneration,"  Epistle  0/ James, 
p.  186. 

3  Outlines  of  Christian  Theology,  p.  396. 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  105 

use  it;  the  warrant  for  his  freedom  is  the 
New  Testament  itself.  Even  our  familiar  and 
comprehensive  "  conversion  "  is  not  the  only- 
legitimate  name ;  perhaps  it  is  not  in  every 
case  the  best  possible  name  for  the  experi- 
ence it  describes.  Conversion  is  the  turning 
round  of  the  soul  from  evil  to  good,  from  sin 
to  God.  But  the  writer  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews  preferred  to  speak  rather  of  our  be- 
ing "  enlightened  "  ; 1  so  that  instead  of  speak- 
ing of  a  man's  conversion  we  might  speak 
with  equal  accuracy,  and  in  some  cases  per- 
haps with  more  perfect  fitness,  of  his  "  illu- 
mination," the  diffusion  of  divine  light 
through  the  sin-darkened  soul.2 

Manifold,  however,  as  are  the  types  of  con- 
version exhibited  or  suggested  by  the  New 
Testament,  we  should  be  mistaken  in  sup- 


1  Heb.  6:4;  10  :  32. 

2  Cf.  Dora  Greenwell's  account  of  the  conversion  of  Lacor. 
daire:  "This  wondrous  spiritual  change  appears  from  his 
own  account  of  it,  to  have  come  to  him  as  a  strong  mental  il- 
lumination, enabling  him  to  see  that  Christianity  was  a  living 
fact ;  and  his  words  in  speaking  of  it  seem  to  recall  the  literal, 
almost  matter-of-fact  simplicity  of  the  statement  of  the  blind 
man  in  Scripture,— « This  one  thing  I  know,  that  whereas  I 
was  blind  now  I  see  ' "  (p.  9)- 


106  VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION 

posing  that  even  these  exhaust  all  possible 
varieties  of  the  experience.  One  considera- 
tion alone  will  be  sufficient  to  make  this 
clear.  When  the  New  Testament  was  written 
Christianity  was  a  new  thing  in  the  world. 
The  type, of  character  with  which  to-day  we 
have  grown  so  familiar,  the  character,  I 
mean,  not  wholly  and  deliberately  Christian, 
and  yet  in  the  main  moulded  by  Christian 
ideals,  was  at  that  time  unknown.  When 
among  ourselves  to-day  a  man  definitely  takes 
upon  himself  the  vows  of  Christian  disciple- 
ship,  and  joins  himself  to  the  company  of 
Christ's  followers,  he  is  not,  except  in  rare 
instances,  conscious  of  any  violent  break  with 
the  beliefs  of  his  past  life ;  the  change  is  not 
in  the  substance  of  his  creed,  but  in  its 
quickening  power ;  in  becoming  a  Christian 
he  is,  after  all,  but  taking  a  step  for  which,  in 
a  certain  very  real  sense,  all  the  past  has  been  a 
preparation;  for,  as  Benjamin  Jowett  truly 
says,  Christianity  is  not  only  part  and  parcel  of 
the  law  of  the  land,  it  is  part  and  parcel  of 
the  character  of  each  one,  which  even  the 
worst  of  men  cannot  wholly  shake  off.     But 


VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION  107 

in  the  world  of  the  New  Testament,  except  in 
so  far  as  Judaism  was  a  preparation  for 
Christianity,  nothing  like  this  was  either 
known  or  possible.  When  the  converts  did 
not  use  the  synagogue  as  a  bridge,  they 
passed  straight  out  of  heathenism  into  Chris- 
tianity, with  the  complete  dislocation  of  their 
whole  life,  intellectual  as  well  as  moral,  which 
such  a  change  must  have  involved.  Is  it 
not,  therefore,  reasonable  to  expect  that  the 
long  course  of  Christian  history  will  some- 
times present  us  with  forms  of  conversion 
which  are  but  very  dimly  if  at  all  fore- 
shadowed in  the  brief  records  which  reflect 
the  life  of  the  first  believers  ? 


Ill 

St.  Paul  was  not  the  only  man,  I  said  a 
few  minutes  ago,  to  be  converted  in  New 
Testament  days.  But  Paul  was  converted, 
and  his  conversion  was  after  the  manner  so 
well  known  to  us.  Moreover,  conversions  of 
the  Pauline — i.  e.,  of  the  sudden,  explosive — 
type  have  never  ceased  in  the  Church  from 


108  VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION 

that  day  till  this.  Let  us  hear  what  Prof. 
James  has  to  say  on  the  matter.  After  giv- 
ing two  or  three  illustrations,  he  says,  "  I 
might  multiply  cases  almost  indefinitely,  but 
these  will  suffice  to  show  you  how  real, 
definite,  and  memorable  an  event  a  sudden 
conversion  may  be  to  him  who  has  the  ex- 
perience. .  .  .  There  is  too  much  evi- 
dence of  this  for  any  doubt  of  it  to  be  pos- 
sible. .  .  .  Were  we  writing  the  story 
of  the  mind  from  the  purely  natural  history 
point  of  view,  with  no  religious  interest  what- 
ever, we  should  still  have  to  write  down 
man's  liability  to  sudden  and  complete  con- 
version as  one  of  his  most  curious  peculiar- 
ities." l  Indeed,  this  is  a  fact  so  well  estab- 
lished that  it  may  seem  superfluous  to  labour 
the  point  further ;  a  few  very  brief  illustra- 
tions, however,  may  be  given  in  a  word  or 
two.  John  Calvin,  who  very  rarely  reveals 
the  secrets  of  his  own  soul,  in  his  preface  to 
his  Commentary  on  the  Psalms,  tells  how 
God  drew  him  from  his  obstinate  attachment 
to  the  superstitions   of   the   Papacy  by  "  a 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  pp.  226-230. 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  109 

sudden  conversion."  !  "  I  was,"  says  Lacor- 
daire,  "unbelieving  in  the  evening,  on  the 
morrow  a  Christian,  certain  with  an  invin- 
cible certainty."  2  "  I  was  converted,"  says 
the  Oxford  graduate  whose  story  I  referred 
to  in  the  previous  lecture,  "  in  my  own  bed- 
room in  my  father's  rectory  house  at  pre- 
cisely three  o'clock  in  the  afternoon  of  a  hot 
July  day."  "About  a  quarter  before  nine," 
wrote  Wesley  in  his  Journal.  "  Most  conver- 
sions of  alcoholics,"  says  Dr.  G.  B.  Cutten, 
"  are  of  a  sudden  nature."  3  One  of  the 
most  striking  and  original  figures  in  the 
wonderful  history  of  the  Free  Church  of 
Scotland  during  the  last  century  is  that  of 
John  Duncan — "  Rabbi  Duncan  "  as  he  was 
often  called.  In  him,  says  his  biographer, 
"  we  behold  the  most  sceptical  of  men  trans- 
formed in  a  moment  into  the  most  believing 
of  men." 4  He  presents,  as  Prof.  Knight 
puts  it,  "  the  picture  of  a  strong  man  sud- 

>  See  T.  M.  Lindsay's  History  of  the  Reformation,  Vol.  II, 

P-97- 

s  Dora  Greenwell's  Lacordaire,  p.  1 1. 

3  The  Psychology  of  Alcoholism,  p.  288. 

*  Memoir  of  John  Duncan,  by  David  Brown,  p.  508. 


IIO  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

denly  arrested,  struck  down  in  his  mid-career 
of  linguistic  study  and  speculative  daring,  by 
the  realities  of  the  unseen  world ; "  his  was 
"one  of  those  swift  upheavals  of  experience 
which  attest  the  agency  of  a  Higher  Power 
working  on  the  spirit  of  man,"  and  which 
"  may  be  often  quoted  as  a  proof  of  the 
genuineness  of  such  a  process  whatever  may 
be  our  theory  of  its  method  or  rationale."  x 
There  are  some,  it  may  be,  who  will  listen 
to  narratives  of  this  kind  with  feelings  bor- 
dering on  incredulity.  They  have  no  ex- 
periences of  their  own  with  which  they  can 
even  approximately  relate  them,  and  they  are 
tempted,  in  consequence,  to  dismiss  them  as 
fanciful  and  unreal.  But  facts  are  not  fairy 
armies  which  vanish  into  thin  air  at  the 
waving  of  a  magician's  wand;  and  in  this 
case  the  facts  are  so  numerous  and  so  well 
authenticated  that  to  attempt  to  ignore  them 
is  simply  to  put  the  fool's  cap  on  our  own 
head.  And  if,  instead  of  ignoring,  we  will 
patiently  investigate  these  sudden  conver- 
sions, two  points  in  regard  to  them  will,  I 

1  Colloquia  Peripatetica,  by  W.  Knight,  pp.  xliv,  xlviii. 


VARIETIES  OF   CONVERSION  III 

think,  become  clear  to  us.  First,  while  no 
divine  significance  attaches  to  the  manner 
of  conversion  but  only  to  the  results  of  it, 
and  while  sudden  conversions  are  often  fol- 
lowed by  disappointing  reactions,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  lives  of  multitudes,  lifted  at 
once  and  permanently  to  a  higher  level,  re- 
main to  attest  the  reality  of  the  experience ; 1 
and,  secondly,  it  seems  unquestionable, 
however  we  may  explain  it,  that  there  are 
some  whose  one  chance  of  better  things  lies 
in  some  sudden,  soul-shattering  experience, 
which  overturns  the  life  from  its  foundations. 
Mansoul  will  not  yield  to  its  besiegers;  it 
must  be  carried  by  sudden  storm.  Here  for 
some  is  their  only  hope — in  one  dead  lift  of 
resolution.2    And  this,  it  may  be  said  in  pass- 

lu  However  sudden,"  says  Jowett,  "were  the  conversions 
of  the  earliest  believers,  however  wonderful  the  circumstances 
which  attended  them,  they  were  not  for  that  reason  the  less 
lasting  or  sincere."     (Essay  quoted  above,  p.  104.) 

2 "  No  doubt  there  are  many  persons  and  some  social 
classes,"  says  Mr.  R.  H.  Hutton,  "  for  whom  there  is  far  more 
chance  of  '  conversion,'  in  Messrs.  Moody  and  Sankey's  sense 
than  of  any  gradual  change."  (See  Essay  quoted  above.)  Cf. 
Dr.  Cutten's  statement  concerning  alcoholics  :  "  Few,  if  any, 
cures  are  recorded  among  conversions  of  the  more  deliberate 
type"  (p.  289). 


112  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

ing,  is  the  justification,  in  part  at  least,  of  the 
methods  of  the  revivalist.  They  may  not 
appeal  to  all ;  some  they  may  even  alienate  ; 
but  the  Church  is  debtor  to  all,  and  through 
the  revivalist  she  seeks  to  discharge  her  debt 
to  those  whose  temperament  makes  salvation 
by  crisis  a  necessity ;  storm  and  stress,  up- 
heaval and  convulsion,  are  for  them  the  ap- 
pointed way  into  life.  Human  nature, 
rightly  interpreted,  reveals  the  need  as 
plainly  as  history  records  the  fact  of  sudden 
conversion. 

IV 

If,  however,  the  facts  compel  the  recogni- 
tion of  the  reality  of  sudden  conversion,  no 
less  plainly  do  they  declare  that  this  is  but 
one  type  among  many.  The  utmost  that  we 
have  any  right  to  insist  on  is,  not  the  neces- 
sity but  the  possibility  of  sudden  conversion, 
not  that  men  must  but  that  men  may  in  a 
moment  be  delivered  from  the  bondage  and 
guilt  of  sin.  To  assume,  as  is  sometimes 
done,  that  the  highest  kind  of  religious  ex- 
perience must  always  be  able  to  date  its  be- 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  113 

ginning  by  the  clock  is  to  contradict  the 
testimony  both  of  Scripture  and  of  experi- 
ence. With  some  the  change  is  swift,  start- 
ling, dramatic  ;  the  tide  of  the  new  life  comes 
in  like  the  waters  of  our  English  Solway, 
with  a  rush  and  a  roar,  carrying  all  before  it 
in  one  mighty  sweep.  With  others  the 
change  is  long  and  slow,  so  long  and  slow 
that  they  are  never  able  to  date  it,  or  to 
speak  of  it  as  a  single,  definite  act.  Some- 
times the  light  breaks  as  in  our  land  comes 
the  dawn,  soft  and  gray  and  with  long  twi- 
light ;  sometimes  as  in  eastern  climes,  where 
day  leaps  on  the  earth  full  born.  But  here, 
again,  the  facts  are  their  own  best  expositors  ; 
once  more,  therefore,  I  turn  to  the  records  of 
Christian  biography.  In  the  examples  which 
follow  we  shall  note  an  almost  entire  absence 
of  those  well-marked  emotional  characteris- 
tics which  are  so  conspicuous  in  many  of 
our  conversion  narratives.  "I  do  not  re- 
member," says  John  Livingstone — a  name 
well  known  in  Scottish  evangelical  circles  and 
linked  with  many  pious  memories  of  the 
Kirk   of   Shotts  and  a  marvellous  work   of 


114  VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION 

grace  there  in  the  seventeenth  century — "  I 
do  not  remember  any  particular  time  of  con- 
version, or  that  I  was  much  cast  down  or  lift 
up."  '  Reference  was  made  in  a  previous 
lecture  to  the  very  explicit  language  of  John 
Henry  Newman  concerning  his  conversion.2 
His  biographer,  however,  points  out  that 
though  it  was  to  evangelical  teaching  that  he 
owed  his  spiritual  life,  yet  "  he  had  not  been 
converted  in  that  special  way  which  it  laid 
down  as  imperative,  but  so  plainly  against 
rule  as  to  make  it  very  doubtful  in  the  eyes 
of  normal  Evangelicals  whether  he  had  really 
been  converted  at  all."  "  I  speak  of  conver- 
sion," Newman  himself  wrote — this  was  in 
182 1 — "with  great  diffidence,  being  obliged 
to  adopt  the  language  of  books.  For  my  own 
feelings,  as  far  as  I  remember,  were  so  differ- 
ent from  any  account  I  have  ever  read,  that 
I  dare  not  go  by  what  may  be  an  individual 
case." 3     After    one   of  Moody's  memorable 

1  See  J.  Walker's  Scottish  Theology  and  Theologians,  p.  168. 

1  See  p.  37. 

s  Transcribing  the  memorandum  in  1826,  he  adds:  "In  the 
matter  in  question,  that  is,  conversion,  my  own  feelings  were 
not  violent,  but  a  returning  to,  a  renewing  of,  principles,  under 


VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION  115 

meetings  in  Scotland  in  the  early  seventies, 
six  young  Edinburgh  students  went  back  to 
their  hotel  to  discuss  far  into  the  night  the 
remarkable  scene  they  had  just  witnessed: 
"  Some  one  started  the  question  whether  it  is 
usual  to  remember  the  date  and  the  incidents 
of  one's  own  conversion.  At  such  a  moment 
it  was  easy  to  be  confidential,  and  it  turned 
out  that  we  were  equally  divided,  three  re- 
membering the  circumstances  in  which  their 
spiritual  life  began,  and  three  not."  l  The 
following  from  Charles  Kingsley's  Life  needs 
no  comment :  "June  12,  1841 — My  birth- 
night.  I  have  been  for  the  last  hour  on  the 
seashore,  not  dreaming,  but  thinking  deeply 
and  strongly,  and  forming  determinations 
which  are  to  affect  my  destiny  through  time 
and  through  eternity.  Before  the  sleeping 
earth  and  the  sleepless  sea  and  stars  I  have 
devoted  myself  to  God  ;  a  vow  never  (if  He 
gives  me  the  faith  I  pray  for)  to  be  recalled."  2 

the  power  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  which  I  had  already  felt  and  in 
a  measure  acted  on  when  young."  (Letters  and  Correspond- 
ence, Vol.  I,  pp.  122-124.) 

1G.  A.  Smith's  Life  of  Henry  Drummond,  p.  65. 

•Vol.  I,  p.  35. 


Il6  VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION 

Very  different,  and  perhaps  still  more  striking, 
is  the  story  of  a  Japanese  Christian  related 
by  Dr.  Dale.  He  was  a  man  of  considerable 
intellectual  culture  and  great  intellectual  ac- 
tivity and  vigour.  He  had  been  a  Con- 
fucian, and  for  many  years  had  studied  Con- 
fucianism carefully,  but  failed  to  find  in  it 
what  he  wanted.  The  rest  shall  be  told  in 
his  own  words  :  "  Just  then  a  Japanese  con- 
vert to  Christianity  gave  me  a  Chinese  Bible, 
and  asked  me  to  read  it.  He  told  me  that 
the  translation  was  a  great  achievement  of 
scholarship,  and  that  I  should  be  charmed 
with  its  literary  beauty.  I  found  that  he  was 
right ;  the  translation  is  admirable.  I  read 
page  after  page  till  I  came  to  the  thirteenth 
chapter  of  Paul's  First  Epistle  to  the  Cor- 
inthians, beginning,  'If  I  speak  with  the 
tongues  of  men  and  of  angels,  but  have  not 
love,  I  am  become  sounding  brass  or  a 
clanging  cymbal.'  I  read  the  whole  chapter, 
I  was  arrested,  fascinated.  I  had  never  seen 
or  heard  or  dreamt  of  a  morality  like  that.  I 
felt  that  it  was  above  the  reach  of  the  human 
race,  that  it  must  have  come  from  heaven, 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  117 

that  the  man  who  wrote  that  chapter  must 
have  received  light  from  God — from  God, 
about  whose  existence  I  had  been  speculat- 
ing. And  then  I  read  the  Gospel  of  John, 
and  the  words  of  Christ  filled  me  with 
wonder.  They  were  not  to  be  resisted.  I 
could  not  refuse  Him  my  faith."  And  so  he 
became  a  Christian.1 

The  same  evidences  of  variety  meet  us 
when  from  the  manner  of  conversion  we  turn 
to  the  motives  and  agencies  which  lead  up 
to  it  and  help  to  bring  it  about.  Saint  Cy- 
prian, it  is  said,  was  brought  to  God  by  the 

1  The  Living  Christ  and  the  Four  Gospels,  pp.  42-45. 
To  the  examples  given  in  the  text  may  be  added  the  following 
reference  to  John  Newton  from  Sir  J.  Stephen's  Essay  on  the 
Evangelical  Succession  :  "  There  is  a  natural  history  of  relig- 
ious conversions.  It  commences  with  melancholy,  advances 
through  contrition  to  faith,  is  then  conducted  to  tranquillity,  and 
after  a  while  to  rapture,  and  subsides  at  length  into  an  abiding 
consolation  and  peace.  No  epoch  in  this  mental  progress  can 
be  passed  over  by  the  narrator  of  any  such  change  without  rais- 
ing some  suspicion  of  its  genuineness  in  those  who  have 
studied  the  human  heart,  rather  as  it  is  described  in  pious 
books,  than  as  it  works  in  pious  men.  But,  braving  all  such 
suspicions  and  strong  in  conscious  sincerity,  Newton  acknowl- 
edged, without  the  least  reserve,  that  he  had  overleapt  all 
these  stages.  His  heart  of  oak  had  been  rent  by  no  poignant 
sorrow  nor  had  it  been  agitated  by  any  tumultuous  joy,  from 
the   beginning   to   the   end   of  his   spiritual  course.     With  no 


Il8  VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION 

reading  of  the  book  of  Jonah.1  Principal 
Lindsay  remarks  on  the  number  of  true 
mediaeval  conversions  due  to  a  vision  of  the 
Virgin  Mary.2  Once  and  again,  in  the 
Duomo  of  Florence,  Savonarola  referred  to 
his  conversion :  "  A  word  did  it,"  he  used  to 
say ;  but  what  the  word  was  his  closest  friends 
never  knew.3  It  was  the  sight  of  a  tree,  dry 
and  leafless  in  the  winter,  that  first  kindled 
in  Brother  Lawrence  the  high  thoughts  of 
God  that  cut  him  loose  from  the  world.4 
Lacordaire,  on  the  other  hand,  was  wont  to 

vehement  internal  conflict  whatever  he  shed  the  skin  of  a  dis- 
solute seaman  and  sheltered  himself  in  that  of  a  devout  clergy, 
man.  He  gave  up  bad  habits  of  life  for  an  infinitely  better 
course,  with  abundant  good  sense,  seriousness  and  deliberation, 
but  with  very  little  passion  or  excitement.  Ill  as  such  an 
anomaly  squared  with  the  prepossessions  of  those  for  whom  he 
wrote,  he  would  not  deviate  by  an  hair's  breadth  from  the 
simple  truth,  nor  affect  any  feeling  which  he  had  not  really  ex- 
perienced, either  to  propitiate  the  good-will  of  his  teachers  or 
disciples  or  to  do  homage  to  their  religious  theories." 

1  R.  F.  Horton's  Minor   Prophets,  (Century  Bible),  p.  197. 

2  Lecture  on  St.  Bernard,  in  The  Evangelical  Succession, 
Vol.  I,  p.  175.  Cf.  the  curious  record  of  the  sudden  conversion 
to  Roman  Catholicism  of  a  freethinking  French  Jew  quoted  by 
Prof.  James  (p.  223). 

3Villari's  Life  and  Times  of  Savonarola,  Bk.  I,  Ch.  I, 
footnote. 

4  The  Practice  of  the  Presence  of  God,  first  conversation. 


VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION  119 

declare,  that  in  his  case,  no  man,  no  book, 
no  sudden  or  striking  appeal  or  event  was 
the  chosen  agent  of  his  conversion  ;  he  only 
knew  that  after  nine  years  of  doubt  he  heard 
the  voice  of  God  and  answered  to  His  call.1 
"  I  was  engaged  to  be  married  and  she  died," 
said  a  young  communicant  once  to  Dr.  Alex- 
ander   Whyte.2       "In    many    souls,"    says 
Bishop  Paget,  "the  first  impulse  of  conver- 
sion may  be  the  sense  of  some  unearthliness, 
some  elevation  above  all  worldly  ways  and 
thoughts,  in  Christian  life."  3     "  Once  in  an 
American   Church,"    says  Tennyson's  biog- 
rapher,  "the   clergyman   yielding   to   some 
sudden  impulse,  recited,  much  to  the  scandal 
and  indignation  of  his   congregation,  'The 
Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade.'     Some  days 
later  a  man  called  on  him  and  said,  '  Sir,  I 
am  one  of  the  survivors  of  the   Balaclava 
charge.     I   have   led   a   wild,  bad   life,  and 
haven't  been  near  a  church,  till  by  accident 
and  from  curiosity  I  went  into  your  church 


'Dora  Greenwell's  Lacordaire,  p.  IX. 

*  Bible  Characters,  Stephen  to  Timothy,  p.  113. 

a  Studies  in  the  Christian  Character,  p.  be. 


120  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

last  Sunday.  I  heard  you  recite  that  great 
poem  and  it  has  changed  my  life :  I  shall 
never  disgrace  my  cloth  again.'  ■  So,'  said 
the  clergyman,  in  a  letter  to  the  poet,  *  though 
I  may  have  lost  my  congregation,  I  have 
saved  a  soul  by  your  poem.'  "  l  Verily,  the 
wind  bloweth  where  it  listeth,  and  we  hear 
the  sound  thereof,  but  cannot  tell  whence  it 
cometh  or  whither  it  goeth. 

V 

If,  then,  such  is  the  great  variety  of  form 
in  which  the  fact  of  conversion  clothes  itself, 
there  is  one  very  obvious  inference  which  we 
must  not  fail  to  draw.  I  do  not  propose  at 
this  point  to  go  behind  the  great  diversities 
of  experience  to  which  the  facts  bear  witness 
and  seek  an  explanation  of  them.  Modern 
psychologists  may  be  right  when  they  tell  us 
that  sudden  conversion  is  connected  with 
"  the  possession  of  an  active  subliminal  self," 
and  that  it  is  in  those  in  whom  certain  peculi- 
arities of  temperament — pronounced  emo- 
tional  sensibility   and   so   forth — unite   that 

^Hallam  Tennyson's  Life  of  his  Father,  p.  717. 


VARIETIES  OF   CONVERSION  121 

religion  finds  the  best  subjects  for  trans- 
formations of  the  striking  and  dramatic  kind. 
This  may  be  so,  but  after  all  the  particular 
form  which  conversion  takes  is  a  matter 
rather  of  psychological  than  religious  sig- 
nificance and  interest.  If  it  be  said  that  a 
man  such  as  St.  Paul  was  certain  to  be  con- 
verted, if  at  all,  in  some  such  way  as  is  re- 
corded in  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles,  religion 
has  no  interest  in  disputing  the  statement, 
for  the  significance  of  St.  Paul's  conversion 
lies  not  at  all  in  the  manner  of  it,  but  wholly 
in  the  results  of  it ;  and,  as  some  one  has 
remarked,  the  divine  Presence  would  have 
been  just  as  decisively  certified  if  Saul  had 
become  a  disciple  with  the  calmness  of  Mat- 
thew, or  Zacchaeus  or  Timothy.  Why  in  one 
case  conversion  should  clothe  itself  in  certain 
emotional  habiliments  which  in  another  are 
wholly  wanting,  is,  I  repeat,  a  question  not 
so  much  for  religion  as  psychology  and  we 
may  with  a  good  conscience  leave  it  to  the 
psychologists  to  thrash  out  at  their  leisure. 

But  the  diversity  itself,  however  little  we 
may  concern  ourselves  with  explanations  of 


122  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

it,  calls  for  the  most  emphatic  and  unequivo- 
cal recognition  on  the  part  of  all  teachers 
and  preachers  of  evangelical  Christianity. 
Probably  nothing  has  done  more  to  foster 
the  antipathy  with  which  in  some  quarters 
the  doctrine  of  conversion  is  still  regarded 
than  the  vulgar  notion  that  (as  Dr.  Wash- 
ington Gladden  puts  it)  there  is  a  mill  to  go 
through,  and  that  everybody  must  go  in  at 
the  hopper  and  come  out  at  the  shoot,  that 
unless  you  have  had  the  regulation  expe- 
rience your  conversion  is  not  genuine.1  It 
may  be  said  that  this  is  a  gross  perversion  of 
evangelical  doctrine,  that  evangelical  Chris- 
tianity has  always  recognized  the  manifold 
varieties  of  experience  which  mark  the  soul's 
return  to  God.  In  a  measure  the  protest  is 
just,  and  yet  it  is  impossible  for  Christian 
teachers  to  disclaim  all  responsibility  for  the 
prevalent  misconceptions.  To  begin  with, 
our  teaching  itself,  all  protests  notwithstand- 
ing, has  not  always  been  above  reproach. 
When,  e.g.,  Jonathan  Edwards  writes  in  his 

1  See  chapter  on  Conversion  in  How  Much   is  Left  of  the 
Old  Doctrines  ? 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  1 23 

Diary,  "  The  chief  thing  that  now  makes  me 
in  any  measure  question  my  good  estate  is 
my  not  having  experienced  conversion  in 
those  particular  steps  wherein  the  people  of 
New  England,  and  anciently  the  dissenters 
of  old  England  used  to  experience  it,"  1  he 
reveals  unconsciously  the  peril  which  always 
besets  the  evangelist.  With  all  Dr.  Dale's 
loyalty  to  Moody  he  could  not  be  blind  to 
the  risks  involved  in  the  stress  which  the  lat- 
ter laid  upon  the  necessity  of  sudden  conver- 
sion ;  for  although  Moody  never  denied  that 
the  soul  might  pass  from  darkness  into  light 
by  a  gradual  transition,  he  assumed  the  other 
to  be  the  normal  experience,  and  that  the 
supreme  change  would  almost  always  be  in- 
stantaneous.2 Even  when  the  reality  of 
other  forms  of  religious  experience  is  not 
openly  questioned,  the  acknowledgment  of 
it  is  sometimes  so  grudging  and  halting  that 
a  definite  denial  would  not  alter  the  impres- 
sion.3    But    whether   with    litde    reason   or 

1  Allen's  Jonathan  Edwards,  p.  35. 
1  Life  ofR.  W.  Dale,  by  his  Son,  p.  321  . 
3  E.g.,    "  I  would   not,"  says  John  Owen,  "  bind  others  by 
any  experience  of  my  own,  unless  it  be  confirmed  by  a  general 


124  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

with  much  in  the  language  of  evangelical 
leaders  the  misconceptions  to  which  I  re- 
ferred just  now  do  undoubtedly  exist.  It 
would  be  easy  to  multiply  illustrations.  In 
one  of  Gladstone's  early  religious  discussions 
he  spoke  of  the  Evangelical  Revival  as  an 
attempt  of  men  who  felt  themselves  de- 
frauded of  the  great  living  powers  enshrined 
in  the  gospel  covenant  to  recover  those 
powers,  and,  "as  it  were,  to  ensure  the  pos- 
session and  enjoyment  of  them  by  compress- 
ing their  whole  agency  into  a  short  and 
single  crisis."  "This  device,"  he  went  on, 
"  so  short,  so  cheap,  so  simple,  has  long  ago 
become  full  of  cracks  and  fissures."  In  a 
similar  vein  Mr.  R.  H.  Hutton  speaks  of 
revivalists  who  he  assumes  are  in  the  habit 
of  teaching  that  "  there  can  be  no  true  re- 
rule  ;  for  one  man  may  have  an  experience  that  another  hath 
not.  But  yet,"  he  goes  on,  taking  away  with  one  hand  what 
he  had  just  given  with  the  other,  "  I  think  this  I  can  say 
that  God  generally  takes  possession  of  souls  in  a  cloud.  That 
is,  there  is  some  darkness  upon  them ;  they  cannot  tell  what 
their  state  is.  Sometimes  they  have  hopes,  and  sometimes  fears, 
sometimes  they  think  things  are  well,  and  sometimes  they  are 
cast  down  again.  This  is  the  way  whereby  God  generally 
enters  into  all  souls."  (James  Moffatt's  Golden  Book  of  John 
Owen,  p.  142.) 


VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION  125 

ligion  without  some  sudden  spiritual  crisis, 
such  as  John  Wesley,  e.g.,  dated  in  his  own 
case  as  having  happened  precisely  at  a 
quarter  before  nine  on  24th  May,  1738."  x 
Prof.  James  stumbles  into  the  same  pit : 
"For  Methodism,"  he  says,  "unless  there 
has  been  a  crisis  of  this  sort  [z.  e.,  "an  acute 
crisis  of  self-despair  and  surrender  followed 
by  relief "]  salvation  is  only  offered,  not  ef- 
fectively received,  and  Christ's  sacrifice  in  so 
far  forth  is  incomplete.  .  .  .  Revivalism 
has  always  assumed  that  only  its  own  type  of 
religious  experience  can  be  perfect ;  you  must 
first  be  nailed  on  the  cross  of  natural  despair 
and  agony,  and  then  in  the  twinkling  of  an 
eye  be  miraculously  released."2  If,  then, 
students  of  religion  as  understanding  and  as 
sympathetic  as  these  manage  so  completely 
to  miss  their  way  in  the  interpretation  of 
evangelical  doctrine,  is  it  any  marvel  if  the 
average  "  outsider  "  finds  in  the  mill  with  its 
hopper  and  shoot  a  sufficient  figure  of  the 
conversion   process?     It    is  our  business  to 

1  See  Essay  quoted  above. 

1  The Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  pp.  227-8. 


126  VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION 

make  all  such  perversions,  whether  of  the 
learned  or  the  unlearned,  for  ever  impossible  ; 
and  it  can  be  done  only  by  the  unequivocal 
recognition  of  all  the  facts  to  which  Christian 
history  and  experience  bear  witness. 

There  are,  moreover,  urgent  practical 
reasons  for  this  step.  The  value  of  conver- 
sion, it  has  been  said  more  than  once,  de- 
pends not  on  how  it  happens  but  on  what  it 
affects.  The  manner  of  it  is  wholly  without 
religious  significance.  But  when  stress  is 
laid  on  this  or  that  type  of  experience,  im- 
mediately attention  is  diverted  from  the  pri- 
mary to  the  secondary  ;  the  true  order  of 
things  is  inverted ;  the  incidental  is  exalted 
above  the  essential,  the  emotional  above  the 
ethical,  the  psychological  above  the  religious. 
Not  only  so,  but  this  exaltation  of  type  may 
easily  become  the  minister  of  a  subtle  spirit- 
ual pride.  Sudden  conversion  does  undoubt- 
edly, by  its  very  nature,  give  to  him  who  has 
experienced  it  a  more  intense  and  immediate 
sense  of  the  reality  of  divine  things  ;  and 
when  with  this  there  mingles  the  thought 
that  the  very  manner  of  the  change  is  itself  a 


VARIETIES   OF   CONVERSION  127 

mark  of  the  special  favour  of  heaven,  the  soil 
is  made  ready  for  that  spiritual  censorious- 
ness  which  is  the  ugliest  weed  that  grows  in 
the  garden  of  God.  The  worst  danger,  how- 
ever, of  our  undue  emphasis,  is  the  disap- 
pointment which  it  inflicts  on  earnest  seekers 
whose  temperament  practically  shuts  them 
out  from  any  such  experience  as  we  appear 
to  declare  essential.  There  are  many  ways 
by  which  sinful  man  may  return  to  God ;  but 
when  we  speak,  or  seem  to  speak,  as  if  there 
were  but  one,  the  way  by  which  we  came 
ourselves,  then  to  him  who  would  come,  but 
knows  he  cannot  come  by  our  way,  we  seem 
to  say  he  cannot  come  at  all.  On  every 
ground,  therefore,  as  well  for  the  sake  of 
those  whom  she  has  already  won  as  for  those 
whom  she  seeks  to  win,  the  Church  must 
open  her  eyes  to  the  manifold  diversities  of 
the  Spirit's  working  in  the  human  heart. 

Prof.  Henry  Drummond  once  stated,  in 
a  meeting  of  Christian  workers  in  Scot- 
land, that  in  all  his  wide  experience  of  revival 
movements,  he  had  seen  very  few  evidences 
of  that  agonizing   conviction   of  sin   which 


128  VARIETIES   OF  CONVERSION 

was  so  characteristic  a  feature  of  similar 
movements  in  the  past.  Did  it  mean,  he 
asked,  that  the  Holy  Spirit  was  in  any  way 
modifying  the  method  of  His  operation? 
The  question  may  well  set  us  thinking.  Are 
there  not  depths  in  Christ's  saying  concern- 
ing the  Holy  Spirit  which  we  have  not  yet 
plumbed,  "  He,  when  He  is  come,  will  con- 
vict the  world  in  respect  of  sin,  and  of  right- 
eousness, and  of  judgment "  ?  "  Conviction 
of  sin  "  we  know ;  what  of  "  conviction  of 
righteousness "  ?  And  yet  are  there  not 
many  to-day  for  whom  the  religious  life  be- 
gins, not  so  much  in  a  sense  of  their  own  sin 
and  guilt  and  need,  as  rather  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  the  glory  and  honour  of  Christ  ? 
It  is  what  they  find  within  themselves  which 
brings  some  men  to  Christ ;  it  is  what  they 
find  in  Him  which  brings  others.  Some  are 
driven  by  the  strong  hands  of  stern  neces- 
sity ;  some  are  wooed  by  the  sweet  constraint 
of  the  sinless  Son  of  God.  Some  are  crushed 
and  broken  and  humbled  to  the  dust,  and 
their  first  cry  is  "  God  be  merciful  to  me  a 
sinner " ;  some  when  they  hear  the  call  of 


VARIETIES  OF  CONVERSION  1 29 

Christ  leap  up  to  greet  Him  with  a  new  light 
in  their  eyes  and  the  glad  confession  on  their 
lips,  "  Lord,  I  will  follow  Thee  whithersoever 
Thou  goest."  ' 

Hear  then  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  mat- 
ter. Conversion  is  the  soul's  return  to  God ; 
wherefore  let  every  man  journey  by  the  road 
which  lies  open  to  him.  Many  will  come  by 
the  Slough  of  Despond,  and  the  Wicket-gate, 
and  the  Hill  Difficulty  ;  but  that  is  not  the 
only  road  to  the  Celestial  City.  Many  will 
come  by  ways  worn  by  the  feet  of  multi- 
tudes, and  some  by  a  lonely  way,  pilgrims  of 
whose  progress  no  man  has  yet  written. 
But  any  road  is  the  right  road  that  reaches 
the  goal  at  last.  On  the  east  three  gates, 
on  the  north  three  gates,  on  the  south  three 
gates,  on  the  west  three  gates ;  and  all  the 
gates  lead  into  the  city. 

1 1  have  made  use  in  this  paragraph  of  a  few  sentences  from 
my  book  The  Teaching  of  Jesus,  pp.  142-3. 


LECTURE  IV 

THE  RATIONALE 
OF  CONVERSION 


LECTURE  IV 
THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

WE  have  now  had  steadily  before  us 
during  three  lectures  the  fact  of 
conversion.  We  have  passed  in 
review  and  have  sought  to  estimate  the  sig- 
nificance of  a  vast  mass  of  human  testimony  ; 
and  we  have  reached  this  threefold  conclu- 
sion :  that  conversion  is  an  experience  very 
manifold  in  its  character,  as  real  in  its  way  as 
the  facts  of  hearing  and  sight,  and  of  deep 
moral  significance  alike  for  the  individual 
and  for  the  race.  We  have  now  to  approach 
the  subject  from  a  somewhat  different  point 
of  view.  There  are,  according  to  Prof. 
James,  three  great  tests  of  the  value  of  all  re- 
ligious opinions  and  experiences  :  immediate 
luminousness,  philosophical  reasonableness, 
and  moral  helpfulness.1     The  application  of 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  1 8. 
!33 


134     THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

the  first  and  third  of  these  tests  to  the  subject 
of  conversion  has  already  been  made ;  it  re- 
mains now  to  apply  the  second,  that,  viz., 
of  philosophical  reasonableness.  In  other 
words,  is  it  possible  convincingly  to  connect 
this  experience — whether  of  the  sudden  and 
explosive,  or  of  the  quiet  and  gradual  type — 
with  other  experiences  of  common  life  ?  Can 
we  knit  it  up  with  our  thinking  in  other 
spheres,  or  must  we  be  content  to  leave  it,  for 
all  save  those  who  have  passed  through  it,  a 
blank  unintelligibility — a  fact  indeed,  but  a 
fact  standing  in  no  discoverable  relation  to 
other  facts,  a  huge  erratic  boulder  of  whose 
presence  in  our  life  thought  can  offer  no  ex- 
planation ? 

There  are  doubtless  some  who  will  listen 
to  questions  of  this  kind  with  ill  disguised 
impatience ;  to  them  all  such  inquiries  are 
wholly  beside  the  mark.  "  What,"  they  will 
ask,  "  is  the  good  of  seeking  to  rationalize 
an  experience  like  conversion  ?  Let  a  man 
get  converted  and  he  will  want  no  explana- 
tions ;  rather,  he  will  have  the  only  kind  of 
explanation  that  is  worth  troubling  about." 


THE   RATIONALE   OF   CONVERSION      135 

Nor  is  the  rough  and  ready  judgment  with- 
out its  truth,  for  it  is  the  certainties  of  expe- 
rience alone  which  lie  beyond  the  question- 
ings of  the  intellect.  When  a  man  falls  back 
on  his  spiritual  consciousness  and  says, 
"  Whereas  I  was  blind,  now  I  see,"  argument 
is  powerless  to  dislodge  him.  Onlookers  may 
dispute  as  they  will  as  to  how  he  received 
his  sight,  their  controversies  are  of  no  real 
concern  to  him  :  "  the  witness  in  himself  he 
hath."  It  must  be  admitted,  too,  that  when 
all  has  been  said  conversion  remains  very 
much  "  a  psychological  or  theological  mys- 
tery." Analogies  and  parallels  may  help  us ; 
they  may  enable  us  in  some  fashion  to  repre- 
sent the  idea  to  our  minds,  and  to  relate  it 
with  other  more  or  less  familiar  ideas  of 
experience ;  but  they  remain  still  only  illus- 
trations, not  explanations;  life  keeps  the 
secret  of  its  beginnings  in  the  spiritual  as  in 
the  natural  world.  Nevertheless,  if  there  are 
any  facts  within  our  reach  that  can  help  us  to 
a  more  intelligent  understanding  of  the  fact 
of  conversion,  we  shall  surely  do  well  to  take 
note  of  them.     It  is  always  the  duty  of  the 


I36     THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

Church  to  make  its  faith  reasonable  to  reason- 
able minds  ;  and  if  there  are  common  human 
experiences  which  have  power  to  light  up 
and  make  more  intelligible  to  us  this  great 
experience  of  religion  we  ought  not  to  fail  to 
enlist  them  in  our  service. 

I 

To  begin  with,  we  have  a  number  of  curious 
and  striking  "conversions  out  of  church,"  as 
they  have  been  called.  Heathen  as  well  as 
Christian  writers  acknowledge  the  necessity 
of  a  conversion  or  new  birth.1  There  are, 
Dr.  Dill  tells  us  in  his  work  on  Roman  So- 
ciety, well  attested  cases  of  individual  con- 
version under  pagan  preaching.  Polemon, 
the  son  of  a  rich  Athenian,  was  a  very  disso- 
lute youth,  who  squandered  his  wealth  on  low 
pleasure.  Once,  coming  from  some  revel,  he 
burst  with  his  companions  into  the  lecture 
room  of  Xenocrates,  who  happened  to  be  dis- 
coursing on  temperance.  Xenocrates  calmly 
continued  his  remarks.  The  tipsy  youth  lis- 
tened for  a  while,  then  flung  away  his  gar- 

1  See  J.  B.  Mayor's  Epistle  0/ James,  p.  189. 


THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      137 

land,  and  with  it  also  his  evil  ways ;  in  after 
years  he  became  himself  the  head  of  the 
Academy.  Plutarch's  conception  of  the  phil- 
osophic gathering,  says  the  same  authority, 
is  perhaps  the  nearest  approach  which  a 
heathen  ever  made  to  the  conception  of  the 
Christian  Church.  He  turned  away  in  dis- 
gust from  the  showy  declamation  of  the 
sophist  whose  chief  object  was  to  dazzle  his 
audience  by  a  display  of  rhetorical  legerde- 
main on  the  most  trivial  or  outworn  themes, 
and  made  a  profession  of  philosophy  a  real 
priesthood  for  the  salvation  of  souls.  When 
his  discussion  was  over,  instead  of  the  subtle 
and  frivolous  questionings  with  which  hearers 
were  wont  to  display  their  own  cleverness,  he 
urged  those  in  moral  difficulty  to  remain  be- 
hind and  lay  bare  to  him  their  faults  and 
spiritual  difficulties.1 

It  is,  however,  in  certain  well-known  auto- 
biographies of  our  own  time  that  we  find  the 
most  suggestive  of  the  parallels  to  which  I 
refer.  In  Sartor  Resartus,  e.  g.,  Thomas 
Carlyle  describes  what  he  calls  his  conversion, 

1  Roman  Society  from  Nero  to  Marcus  Aurelius,  pp.  3^7,413. 


138      THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION 

or  new  birth,  when  he  "  authentically  took 
the  Devil  by  the  nose,"  and  when  he  began 
to  achieve  the  convictions,  positive  and  neg- 
ative, by  which  the  whole  of  his  later  life  was 
governed.  "  Nothing  in  Sartor  jResarlus," 
he  says,  "  is  fact ;  symbolical  myth  all,  except 
that  of  the  incident  in  the  Rue  St.  Thomas 
de  l'Enfer,  which  occurred  quite  literally  to 
myself  in  Leith  Walk,  during  three  weeks  of 
total  sleeplessness.  ...  I  remember  it 
well,  and  could  go  straight  to  about  the 
place."  :  What  was  the  nature  of  the  inci- 
dent which  is  thus  authenticated  ?  One  para- 
graph will  perhaps  be  sufficient  to  show : 
"  All  at  once,  there  rose  a  Thought  in  me, 
and  I  asked  myself '  What  are  thou  afraid  of  ? 
Wherefore,  like  a  coward,  dost  thou  forever 
pip  and  whimper,  and  go  cowering  and  trem- 
bling ?  Despicable  biped  !  what  is  the  sum- 
total  of  the  worst  that  lies  before  thee  ? 
Death  ?  Well,  Death  ;  and  say  the  pangs  of 
Tophet  too,  and  all  that  the  Devil  and  man 
may,  will  or  can  do  against  thee !  Hast 
-thou  not  a  heart ;  canst  thou  not  suffer  what- 

1  CarlyWs  Early  Life,  by  J.  A.  Froude,  Ch.  VII. 


THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      1 39 

soever  it  be;  and  as  a  Child  of  Freedom, 
though  outcast,  trample  Tophet  itself  under 
thy  feet,  while  it  consumes  thee?  Let  it 
come,  then  ;  I  will  meet  it  and  defy  it  1 '  And 
as  I  so  thought,  there  rushed  like  a  stream  of 
fire  over  my  whole  soul  ;  and  I  shook  base 
fear  away  from  me  forever.  I  was  strong,  of 
unknown  strength  ;  a  spirit,  almost  a  god. 
Ever  from  that  time,  the  temper  of  my  misery 
was  changed :  not  Fear  or  whining  Sorrow 
was  it,  but  Indignation  and  grim  fire-eyed 
Defiance.  .  .  .  It  is  from  this  hour  that 
I  incline  to  date  my  spiritual  new-birth  ;  per- 
haps I  directly  thereupon  began  to  be  a 
man."  ' 

From  Thomas  Carlyle  let  us  turn  to  John 
Stuart  Mill,  whose  Autobiography  records  a 

» Sartor  Resartus,  Bk.  II,  Ch.  VII.  "  Blame  not  the  word," 
he  writes  of  conversion  later  on,  "  rejoice  rather  that  such  a 
word  signifying  such  a  thing,  has  come  to  light  in  our  Modern 
Era,  though  hidden  from  the  wisest  Ancients.  The  Old 
World  knew  nothing  of  Conversion  ;  instead  of  an  Ecce  Homo, 
they  had  only  some  Choice  of  Hercules.  It  was  a  new-attained 
progress  in  the  Moral  Development  of  man ;  hereby  has  the 
Highest  come  home  to  the  bosoms  of  the  most  Limited  :  what 
to  Plato  was  but  an  hallucination,  and  to  Socrates  a  chimera,  is 
now  clear  and  certain  to  your  Zinzendorfs,  your  Wesleys,  and 
the  poorest  of  their  Pietists  and  Methodists."     (Ch.  X.) 


I40      THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION 

similar  mental  crisis  :  "  It  was  in  the  autumn 
of  1826.  I  was  in  a  dull  state  of  nerves,  such  as 
everybody  is  occasionally  liable  to  ;  unsuscep- 
tible to  enjoyment  or  pleasurable  excitement; 
one  of  those  moods  when  what  is  pleasure 
at  other  times,  becomes  insipid  or  indifferent ; 
the  state,  I  should  think,  in  which  con- 
verts to  Methodism  usually  are,  when  smitten 
by  their  first  '  conviction  of  sin.'  "  Through 
all  the  months  of  that  dreary  winter  the  cloud 
hung  over  him.  He  seemed  to  himself  like 
a  ship  stranded  at  the  beginning  of  its  voy- 
age and  without  sail.  All  the  fountains  of 
desire  were  dried  up  within  him.  Neither 
friends  nor  books  availed  him  aught.  He  be- 
gan to  wonder,  if,  on  such  terms,  life  could 
be  long  endured.  Gradually,  however,  the 
cloud  lifted.  The  first  ray  of  light  came 
through  the  reading  of  Marmontel's  Memoires. 
But  it  was  in  the  poems  of  Wordsworth  that 
he  found  the  best  medicine  for  his  troubled 
soul.  These  did  for  him  what  the  works  of 
other  and  greater  poets  were  powerless  to 
do  :  "I  felt  myself,"  he  says,  " at  once  better 
and  happier  as  I  came  under  their  influence, 


THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION       141 

and  "the  result  was  that  I  gradually,  but 
completely,  emerged  from  my  habitual  de- 
pression, and  was  never  again  subject  to  it."  x 
In  another  of  these  "  conversions  out  of 
church,"  Wordsworth  is  again  the  chosen  in- 
strument, and  I  take  the  following  from 
"  Mark  Rutherford's  "  Autobiography :  "  One 
day,  a  day  I  remember  as  well  as  Paul  must 
have  remembered  afterwards  the  day  on  which 
he  went  to  Damascus,  I  happened  to  find 
amongst  a  parcel  of  books  a  volume  of  poems 
in  paper  boards.  It  was  called  Lyrical  Bal- 
lads, and  I  read  first  one  and  then  the  whole 
book.  It  conveyed  to  me  no  new  doctrine, 
and  yet  the  change  it  wrought  in  me  could 
only  be  compared  with  that  which  is  said  to 
have  been  wrought  on  Paul  himself  by  the 
divine  apparition.  ...  It  excited  a 
movement  and  a  growth  which  went  on  till 
by  degrees  all  the  systems  which  enveloped 
me  like  a  body  gradually  decayed  from  me 
and  fell  away  into  nothing.  .  .  .  God  is 
nowhere  formally  deposed,  and  Wordsworth 
would  have  been  the  last  man  to  say  that  he 

1  Autobiography,  Ch.  V. 


142      THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION 

had  lost  faith  in  the  God  of  his  fathers.  But 
his  real  God  is  not  the  God  of  the  Church, 
but  the  God  of  the  hills,  the  abstraction  Na- 
ture ;  and  to  this  my  reverence  was  transferred. 
Instead  of  an  object  of  worship  which  was 
altogether  artificial,  remote,  never  coming 
into  genuine  contact  with  me,  I  had  now 
one  which  I  thought  to  be  real,  one  in  which 
literally  I  could  live,  move,  and  have  my  be- 
ing, an  actual  fact  present  before  my  eyes. 
God  was  brought  from  that  heaven  of  the 
books,  and  dwelt  on  the  downs  in  the  far- 
away distances,  and  in  every  cloud-shadow 
which  wandered  across  the  valley.  Words- 
worth unconsciously  did  for  me  what  every 
religious  reformer  has  done, — he  re-created 
my  Supreme  Divinity ;  substituting  a  new 
and  living  spirit  for  the  old  deity,  once  alive, 
but  gradually  hardened  into  an  idol." 

One  further  example — and  this  the  last — 
may  be  found  in  George  Gissing's  powerful 
if  somewhat  sombre  volume  The  Private  Pa- 
pers of  Henry  Ryecroft.  One  whose  long 
hard  years  in  London  streets  had  obscured 
happy  early  memories  of  quiet  rural  beauty 


THE   RATIONALE   OF   CONVERSION      1 43 

found  himself  one  glorious  day  in  spring 
amid  the  flowers  and  sunshine  of  Devon  :  "  I 
had  stepped  into  a  new  life.  Between  the 
man  I  had  been  and  that  which  I  now  be- 
came there  was  a  very  notable  difference. 
In  a  single  day  I  had  matured  astonishingly ; 
which  means,  no  doubt,  that  I  suddenly 
entered  into  conscious  enjoyment  of  powers 
and  sensibilities  which  had  been  developing 
unknown  to  me.  To  instance  only  one 
point :  till  then  I  had  cared  very  little  about 
plants  and  flowers,  but  now  I  found  myself 
eagerly  interested  in  every  blossom,  in  every 
growth  of  the  wayside.  ...  To  me  the 
flowers  became  symbolical  of  a  great  release, 
of  a  wonderful  awakening.  My  eyes  had  all 
at  once  been  opened  ;  till  then  I  had  walked 
in  darkness  and  knew  it  not." 

And  now  again,  I  think,  I  hear  the  prot- 
estations of  those  to  whose  objections  we 
were  listening  a  few  minutes  ago.  Is  not  all 
this,  it  will  be  asked,  the  very  superfluity  of 
naughtiness?  Conversion  is  an  experience 
specifically  and  exclusively  Christian,  and  to 
seek  to  explain  it  by  dragging  in  experiences 


144      THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION 

of  a  wholly  different  order — intellectual,  aes- 
thetic, or  whatever  be  the  right  name  for 
them — like  those  just  related,  is  mere  wanton- 
ness. Well,  of  course,  if  conversion  is  an  ex- 
perience so  specifically  and  exclusively  Chris- 
tian that  nothing  in  life  presents  any  sort  of 
parallel  to  it,  there  is  an  end  of  the  matter ; 
there  is  and  can  be  no  such  thing  as  a  ra- 
tionale of  conversion ;  we  are  only  wasting 
time  in  talking  about  it.  But  surely  this  is  a 
conclusion  to  which  we  shall  not  readily  al- 
low ourselves  to  be  shut  up.  We  may  feel 
no  necessity  to  relate  the  experiences  of  re- 
ligion with  life's  other  experiences ;  to  us 
they  may  be  so  entirely  self-luminous  that 
we  need  light  from  no  other  quarter  by 
which  to  interpret  them.  But  all  men  are 
not  as  we  are,  and  we  owe  it  to  our  faith  and 
to  our  fellows  to  keep  open  any  and  every 
approach  by  which  it  may  win  its  way  to 
them.  Let  us  not,  therefore,  grow  impatient 
of  analogies,  however  far  short  they  fall,  that 
have  in  them  any  promise  of  help.  You  re- 
member our  English  poet's  plea  for  the  re- 
ligions of  mankind : 


THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION      145 

**  Which  has  not  taught  weak  wills  how  much  they  can? 
Which  has  not  fall'n  on  the  dry  heart  like  rain  ? 
Which  has  not  cried  to  sunk,  self-weary  man : 
Thou  must  be  born  again  /  " 

And  in  like  manner  even  these  "conver- 
sions out  of  church" — pale  ghosts  of  the 
moonlight  as  we  may  think  them  in  compari- 
son with  the  real  thing — may  serve  to  make 
more  credible  to  some  the  Church's  gospel  of 
a  new  life  in  Jesus  Christ. 

II 

And  yet  experiences  such  as  these  of  Car- 
lyle  and  Mill  and  the  rest,  interesting  and 
suggestive  as  they  are,  will  not  carry  us  far 
towards  the  goal  we  are  in  search  of.  If  we 
are  to  gain  for  our  conception  of  conversion 
some  degree  of  the  philosophical  reason- 
ableness which  Prof.  James  postulates  as  a 
necessity  for  any  doctrine  that  is  to  be  worthy 
of  all  acceptation,  it  must  be  through  the  dis- 
covery of  some  general  and  well  recognized 
law  under  which  our  conversion  phenomena 
may  be  grouped. 

Now  we  are  all  familiar  with  the  way  in 


146      THE   RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

which  a  man's  whole  life  organizes  itself,  so 
to  speak,  around  some  idea,  or  group  of 
ideas,  which  happens  for  the  moment  to  be 
in  the  ascendancy.  His  thoughts,  his  inter- 
ests, his  anxieties,  are  all  determined  by  the 
character  of  the  ruling  idea  which  for  the 
time  exercises  authority  over  him.  When, 
e.  g.} — to  borrow  one  of  Prof.  James'  happy 
illustrations — the  President  of  the  United 
States,  with  paddle,  gun,  and  fishing  rod 
goes  camping  in  the  wilderness  for  a 
vacation  he  changes  his  system  of  ideas  from 
top  to  bottom.  The  presidential  anxieties 
have  lapsed  into  the  background  entirely ; 
the  official  habits  are  replaced  by  the  habits 
of  a  son  of  nature,  and  those  who  knew  the 
man  only  as  the  strenuous  magistrate  would 
not  "  know  him  for  the  same  person  "  if  they 
saw  him  as  the  camper.1  Similarly,  we  know 
how  the  entering  in  of  some  new  and  regnant 
idea  may  end  in  a  complete  and  permanent 
readjustment  of  a  man's  whole  life,  of  all  his 
thoughts  and  ways.  This  is  the  meaning  of 
Dr.  Chalmers'  famous  phrase,  "  the  expulsive 

1  The  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  193. 


THE   RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      147 

power  of  a  new  affection."  The  new  idea 
has  power  to  create  a  new  centre  of  personal 
activity  and  (to  use  again  the  phrase  which 
was  used  just  now)  to  organize  the  whole 
life  about  itself.  Illustrations  may  be  found 
on  every  hand.  Some  years  ago  a  crisis  oc- 
curred in  the  political  life  of  England.  The 
leading  statesman  of  the  day  introduced  in 
the  House  of  Commons  a  measure  which  led 
to  an  immediate  and  disastrous  division  in 
the  ranks  of  his  own  party.  What  was  the 
result?  For  many  of  those  who  broke  the 
party  bond,  opposition  to  the  ill-starred 
measure  became  the  governing  principle  of 
their  political  life ;  it  forced  them  into  new 
alliances ;  it  modified  their  relation  to  most 
of  the  other  political  questions  of  the  hour ; 
it  shifted,  consciously  or  unconsciously,  the 
bias  of  their  thinking  and  in  the  end  many 
of  them  became  politically  new  men. 

But  it  is  within  the  sphere  of  personal  re- 
lations that  we  find  the  most  signal  examples 
of  what  I  have  been  saying.  Great  is  the 
power  of  ideas  ;  but  it  is  when  these  ideas  are 
incarnated  for  us  in  living  men  and  women 


148     THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

that  they  put  forth  their  full  might.  A 
youth  is  pushed  to  the  brink  of  some  ter- 
rible temptation ;  one  thought  steadies  and 
saves  him :  "  How  shall  I  do  this  great 
wickedness  and  yet  keep  her  love  ?  "  A  girl 
is  giddy  and  idle  and  vain  ;  she  becomes  a 
mother,  and  the  feeling  of  motherhood  creates 
a  new  centre  about  which  a  new  life  builds 
itself  up ;  the  love  of  a  little  child  has  re- 
deemed her.  Our  great  imaginative  writers 
understand  the  meaning  of  these  things. 
What,  e.  g.,  are  the  moral  recoveries  of  Jean 
Valjean  in  Les  Mis  Arables,  and  of  Sidney 
Carton  in  The  Tale  of  Two  Cities,  and  of  the 
selfish  old  peer  in  the  child's  story  of  Little 
Lord  Fauntleroy>  but  so  many  instances  of 
the  redeeming  might  of  human  love  ? !  It 
is  strange,  sometimes,  at  how  light  a  touch 
the  door  of  the  spirit  opens,  and  lo  !  God  is 
there :  /'.'  A  man  now  old  and  nearing  his 
end  one  Sunday  November  afternoon,  when 
he  was  but  twenty  years  old,  met  a  woman 

1 1  am  indebted  for  these  three  examples  to  Bishop  Gore. 
See  his  appendix  to  Lux  Mundi  on  "  The  Christian  Doctrine 
of  Sin." 


THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      1 49 

in  a  London  street  and  looked  in  her  face. 
Neither  he  nor  she  stopped  for  an  instant ; 
he  looked  in  her  face,  passed  on,  and  never 
saw  her  again.  He  married,  had  children, 
who  now  have  children,  but  that  woman's 
face  has  never  left  him,  and  the  colours  of  the 
portrait  which  hangs  in  his  soul's  oratory  are 
as  vivid  as  ever.  A  thousand  times  has  he 
appealed  to  it ;  a  thousand  times  has  it  sat  in 
judgment;  and  a  thousand  times  has  its 
sacred  beauty  redeemed  him."y  For  some 
this  is  perhaps  a  hard  saying,  and  they  are 
not  able  to  receive  it ;  and  yet  who  does  not 
know  how  along  unseen  wires  another's  soul 
may  flash  its  mystic  message  to  his  own  and 
make  for  him  the  dawning  of  a  better  day  ? 

"  Only — but  this  is  rare  — 

When  a  beloved  hand  is  laid  in  ours, 

When  jaded  with  the  rush  and  glare 

Of  the  interminable  hours, 

Our  eyes  can  in  another's  eyes  read  clear, 

When  our  world :deafen'd  ear 

Is  by  the  tones  of  a  loved  voice  caress' d  — 

A  bolt  is  shot  back  somewhere  in  our  breast, 

And  a  lost  pulse  of  feeling  stirs  again. 

,Mark  Rutherford's  Miriam's  Schooling,  p.  1 19. 


150     THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

The  eye  sinks  inward,  and  the  heart  lies  plain, 
And  what  we  mean,  we  say,  and  what  we  would, 

we  know. 
A  man  becomes  aware  of  his  life's  flow, 
And  hears  its  winding  murmur ;  and  he  sees 
The  meadows  where  it  glides,  the  sun,  the  breeze. " 

It  is  in  the  line  of  experiences  such  as  these 
that  conversion  finds  its  place.  It  is  the  su- 
preme illustration  of  the  re-organization  of 
life  about  a  new  centre,  the  crowning  ex- 
ample of  redemption  by  a  person.  Again  I 
say,  I  do  not  mean  that  herein  lies  the  whole 
philosophy  of  conversion,  but  enough  to  save 
the  doctrine  from  the  charge  of  irrationality. 
If  by  the  admission  into  his  political  creed  of 
some  new  article  of  faith,  a  man's  whole  out- 
look is  changed  and  in  the  end  he  becomes 
politically  another  self,  who  will  set  limits  to 
the  change  which  a  new  thought  of  God  may 
work  through  all  the  reaches  of  his  being  ? 
If  we  read  in  a  work  of  fiction  how  some  man 
looked  for  the  first  time  into  a  woman's  face 
and  knew  that  for  him  life  from  that  hour 
was  charged  with  a  new  purpose,  we  should 

1  The  Buried  Life,  by  Matthew  Arnold. 


THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION      151 

not  put  down  the  book  with  a  gesture  of  im- 
patience, because  we  know  that  such  things 
do  happen.  Why,  then,  should  it  seem  a 
thing  incredible  that  by  the  sudden  crossing 
of  a  human  life  by  the  Son  of  God,  old  things 
should  pass  away,  all  things  should  become 
new?  It  is  this  personal  commerce  of  the 
soul  with  Christ  Himself  in  conversion  that 
calls  for  special  emphasis.  I  have  heard  of 
one  whose  whole  life  was  changed  through 
the  weekly  reading  during  three  months  of 
the  thirteenth  chapter  of  First  Corinthians. 
And  when  we  remember  what  vital  moral 
forces  are  stored  within  the  compass  of  those 
few  verses,  we  find  nothing  in  the  story  to 
stumble  at.  But  in  conversion  the  soul  is 
dealing  not  merely  with  moral  ideas,  how- 
ever mighty,  but  with  Christ  Himself.  It  is 
brought  within  the  sphere  of  those  personal 
relations  through  which,  as  we  have  seen,  the 
supreme  transformations  of  life  are  wrought. 
A  very  simple  illustration  will  show  what  is 
meant.  There  lived  once  a  young  girl  whose 
perfect  grace  of  character  was  the  wonder  of 
those  who  knew  her.     She  wore  on  her  neck 


152      THE   RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

a  gold  locket  which  no  one  was  ever  allowed 
to  open.  One  day,  in  a  moment  of  unusual 
confidence,  one  of  her  companions  was  al- 
lowed to  touch  its  spring  and  learn  its  secret. 
She  saw  written  these  words — "  Whom  hav- 
ing not  seen,  I  love."  That  was  the  secret  of 
her  beautiful  life.  And  that,  too,  be  it  said  is 
the  secret  of  Christianity :  it  is  redemption 
through  a  Person.  Religion  is  not  magical, 
it  is  reasonable  ;  and  when  once  we  have 
learned  to  think  of  it,  not  so  much  in  terms 
of  a  creed  to  be  believed  as  rather  of  a  per- 
sonal relationship  to  be  shared,  immediately 
we  realize  the  true  nature  of  the  forces  which 
through  it  are  set  free,  and  the  consequent 
reasonableness  of  the  Church's  doctrine  of 
conversion. 

Ill 
But  how,  it  may  be  asked,  can  we  defend 
the  doctrine  of  sudden  conversion?  That 
character  should  be  slowly  modified  under 
the  steady  impact  of  the  forces  of  the  spirit- 
ual world — that  we  can  understand  ;  but  that 
in  a  single  day,  a  single  hour,  without  warn- 
ing   or   preparation,   the   government  of  a 


THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION      1 53 

man's  life  should  pass  into  other  hands,  and 
he  himself  become  literally  a  new  creation — 
this  is  altogether  beyond  our  comprehension. 
And  when,  e.g.,  we  find  a  man  saying,  as 
Lacordaire  does,  "  I  was  unbelieving  in  the 
evening,  on  the  morrow  a  Christian,  certain 
with  an  invincible  certainty,"  we  can  only 
throw  up  our  hands  in  despair,  and  ask  with 
Nicodemus,  "  How  can  these  things  be  ? " 
As  we  shall  see  in  the  next  lecture,  sudden 
conversion  is  a  phenomenon  concerning 
which  modern  psychology  has  suggestions  of 
its  own  to  offer.  Passing  these  by  for  the 
moment,  however,  let  us  see  if  in  the  direc- 
tion already  indicated  there  be  not  help 
awaiting  us. 

And,  first  of  all,  let  us  ask,  if  sudden  con- 
versions do  really  involve  such  a  break  with 
experience  as  is  often  assumed.  Are  they  so 
entirely  disparate  from  all  else  that  we  know 
that  their  very  isolation  may  justly  create  a 
prejudice  against  them  ?  In  reply,  I  will  ask 
you  to  consider  some  weighty  words  of  Ben- 
jamin Jowett :  "  If,"  he  says,  "  while  acknowl- 
edging that  a  great  proportion  of  mankind 


154      THE   RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION 

are  the  creatures  of  habit,  and  that  a  great 
part  of  our  actions  are  nothing  more  than  the 
result  of  habit,  we  go  on  to  ask  ourselves 
about  the  changes  of  our  life,  and  fix  our 
minds  on  the  critical  points,  we  are  led  to 
view  human  nature  in  a  way  more  accordant 
with  the  language  of  Scripture.  We  no 
longer  measure  ourselves  by  days  or  by 
weeks ;  we  are  conscious  that  at  particular 
times  we  have  undergone  great  revolutions 
or  emotions;  and  then,  again,  have  inter- 
vened periods,  lasting  perhaps  for  years,  in 
which  we  have  pursued  the  even  current  of 
our  way.  Our  progress  towards  good  may 
have  been  in  idea  an  imperceptible  and 
regular  advance  ;  in  fact  we  know  it  to  have 
been  otherwise.  We  have  taken  plunges  in 
life  ;  there  are  many  eras  noted  in  our  exist- 
ence. .  .  .  Changes  in  character  come 
more  often  in  the  form  of  feeling  than  of 
reason,  from  some  new  affection  or  attach- 
ment, or  alienation  of  our  former  self,  rather 
than  from  the  slow  growth  of  experience,  or 
a  deliberate  sense  of  right  and  duty."  l 

1  Essay  quoted  above,  pp.  119,  121. 


THE   RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      155 

When,  moreover,  conversion  is  given  the 
place  which  rightly  belongs  to  it — within  the 
sphere  of  personal  relations,  i.  e.> — the  most 
elementary  knowledge  will  teach  us  that 
within  that  sphere  the  time  factor  is  of  all 
factors  the  least  considerable.  When  two 
souls  really  touch  that  may  happen  with 
which  neither  many  words  nor  the  ticking  of 
the  clock  have  aught  to  do.  "  Love  at  first 
sight "  is  often  a  thoughtless  phrase,  lightly 
used  ;  but  love  at  first  sight  is  more  than  a 
phrase,  it  is  a  fact,  it  is  a  real  experience  in 
human  life.  And  sometimes,  with  all  rev- 
erence be  it  spoken,  there  is  love  at  first 
sight  betwixt  the  soul  and  its  Lord.  Is  not 
this  the  simple  fact  which  lies  behind  some  of 
the  stories  of  the  life  of  Jesus?  Take,  e.g.% 
the  call  of  Nathaniel  to  be  a  disciple.  A  few 
short  verses  tell  the  whole  story.  Here  is  a 
man  who,  so  far  as  we  know,  had  never  seen 
Jesus  before.  A  friend  brings  him  into  His 
presence,  and  at  a  word,  he  capitulates. 
Prejudices — and  prejudices  we  know  he  had 
— are  swept  aside,  and  in  a  moment — so  at 
least  it  would  seem — the  decision  of  a  life- 


156      THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION 

time  is  taken.  How  unreasoning  and  un- 
reasonable it  all  sounds !  What  depth  of 
conviction,  we  ask,  could  there  be  in  one  who 
suffered  himself  to  be  swung  clean  round  in 
such  so  easy  fashion  ?  But,  waiving  for  the 
moment  the  question  of  the  completeness  of 
the  evangelist's  narrative — though  many 
things  must  have  passed  between  Jesus  and 
Nathaniel  which  John  has  not  recorded — we 
may  be  quite  sure  that  that  which  won  the 
disciple  to  the  Master's  side  and  grappled 
him  to  Him  as  with  hooks  of  steel,  was  not 
merely  something  which  Jesus  said,  and  which 
another  listening  could  report ;  rather  it  was  a 
something  which  went  forth  from  Him,  forth 
from  His  eyes,  from  His  heart,  from  His  whole 
being,  a  subtle  magnetic  something  which 
cast  its  spell  about  Nathaniel  and  bound  him 
for  ever  to  the  Man  of  Nazareth — that  touch 
of  soul  with  soul  to  which  all  things  are  pos- 
sible. There  are  moments  in  which  the 
work  of  a  lifetime  is  done ;  there  are  expe- 
riences which  crowd  eternity  into  an  hour,  or 
which  stretch  an  hour  into  eternity  ;  and  such 
an  hour,  such  a  moment,  was  it  in  the  life  of 


THE   RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      157 

Nathaniel  when  first  he  stood  in  the  presence 
of  Jesus. 

I  quoted  just  now  some  words  of  Benjamin 
Jowett.  Let  me  add  to  them  the  words  of 
another  whose  still  greater  distance  from  the 
evangelical  interpretation  of  Christianity  gives 
to  his  judgment  a  peculiar  significance. 
"  There  is  no  single  thing,"  says  F.  W.  New- 
man, "  which  more  strikes  me  as  indicating  a 
defective  philosophy  current  concerning  the 
Soul,  than  the  incredulity  and  contempt 
which  is  cast  upon  sudden  conversions.  Sud- 
den political  revolutions  are  never  treated  as 
incredible  or  marvellous.  It  is  readily  under- 
stood that  in  a  State  two  or  three  different 
powers  are  struggling  together  with  inde- 
pendent force ;  and  often  with  alternate  suc- 
cess. At  last  a  party  which  was  depressed 
rises  in  sudden  might,  deposes  that  which 
held  the  chief  power,  and  assumes  the  helm. 
Many  moralizers  seem  not  to  be  aware,  that, 
similarly,  in  the  narrow  compass  of  one  man's 
bosom  two  or  three  powers  are  often  striving 
together  for  mastery.  Rather  they  know  of 
nothing  but  '  Reason  and  Passion '  ;  and  as 


158      THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION 

Reason  acts  gently  and  very  steadily,  and 
only  Passion  by  violent  impulse,  they  can  un- 
derstand indeed  that  a  man  may  fall  into  dire 
sin  all  in  a  moment,  but  not  how  he  can  rise 
out  of  it  all  in  a  moment.  This  is  because 
they  know  nothing  of  the  forces  of  the  Soul, 
which  are  in  fact  true  Passions  themselves. 
.  .  .  Indeed  the  remark  may  be  made  on 
all  intuitive  impressions, — that  they  are  at 
first  sudden  and  impulsive.  The  beauty  of  a 
scene,  of  a  statue,  of  a  human  face,  strikes  us 
with  impetus.  Not  that  we  discern  it  always 
at  first  sight :  we  may  have  needed  some 
familiarity  with  it  before  we  see  it  in  the  right 
position,  and  gather  up  into  a  single  whole 
that  on  which  the  effect  depends :  but  at  last 
we  catch  it  all  in  a  moment,  and  perhaps 
wonder  why  it  never  so  affected  us  before."  l 

IV 

One  word  only  remains  to  be  spoken,  and 
that  is  the  word  not  of  a  theologian  but  of  a 
poet.     Students   of   Robert   Browning  have 

»  The  Soul,  Ch.  2. 


THE   RATIONALE   OF   CONVERSION      1 59 

often  called  attention  to  the  persistence  with 
which  he  dwells  on  the  spiritual  significance 
of  those  rare  moments  by  which  the  souls  of 
men  are  visited,  when  a  light  from  heaven 
above  the  brightness  of  the  sun  shines  about 
their  path  and  the  very  voice  of  God  is  heard. 
Almost  anything  may  serve  to  be  the  medium 
of  the  divine  message.  "There  are  some 
mortals  on  this  earth  to  whom  nothing  more 
than  a  certain  summer  morning  very  early, 
or  a  certain  chance  idea  in  a  lane  ages  ago, 
or  a  certain  glance  from  a  fellow-creature, 
dead  for  years,  has  been  the  Incarnation,  the 
Crucifixion,  the  Resurrection,  or  the  Descent 
of  the  Holy  Ghost."  1  This  is  the  faith  of 
Robert  Browning,  and  at  its  root  it  is  one 
with  the  Church's  doctrine  of  conversion. 
Indeed,  one  enthusiastic  expositor  of  the  poet's 
teaching  does  not  hesitate  to  declare  that  his 
teaching  on  conversion  is  "  his  supreme  mes- 
sage to  our  time  "  ;  it  is  this  that  ranks  him 
with  the  prophets — "his  impassioned  confi- 
dence that  the  soul  may,  in  one  grand  mo- 
ment, leap  sheer  out  of  any  depth  of  shame 

1  Miriam's  Schooling,  p.  118. 


l6o      THE   RATIONALE  OF   CONVERSION 

or  subtle  bondage,  and  leap  to  the  breast  of 
God."  l 

"  Oh,  we're  sunk  enough  here,  God  knows  ! 

But  not  quite  so  sunk  that  moments, 
Sure  tho'  seldom,  are  denied  us, 

When  the  spirit's  true  endowments 
Stand  out  plainly  from  its  false  ones, 

And  apprise  it  if  pursuing 
Or  the  right  way  or  the  wrong  way, 

To  its  triumph  or  undoing. 

"  There  are  flashes  struck  from  midnights, 

There  are  fire-flames  noondays  kindle, 
Whereby  piled-up  honours  perish, 

Whereby  swollen  ambitions  dwindle, 
While  just  this  or  that  poor  impulse, 

Which  for  once  had  play  unstifled, 
Seems  the  sole  work  of  a  lifetime 

That  away  the  rest  have  trifled."  a 

Or  take  those  great  lines  from  The  Ring  and 
the  Book  in  which  the  Pope  passes  judgment 
on  Guido — Guido  the  infamous : 

1  See  Mr.  J.  A.  Hutton's  admirable  little  volume,  Guidance 
from  Robert  Browning  in  Matters  of  Faith,  to  which  through- 
out the  whole  of  this  section  of  my  lecture  I  am  greatly  in- 
debted. Dr.  Washington  Gladden  makes  a  similar  application 
of  the  poet's  teaching  in  his  How  Much  is  Left  of  the  Old  Doc- 
trines?   See  also  Prof.  Corson's  book  referred  to  below. 

2  Cristina. 


THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION      l6l 

"For  the  main  criminal  I  have  no  hope 
Except  in  such  a  suddenness  of  fate. 
I  stood  at  Naples  once,  a  night  so  dark 
I  could  have  scarce  conjectured  there  was  earth 
Anywhere,  sky  or  sea  or  world  at  all : 
But  the  night's  black  was  burst  through  by  a  blaze  — 
Thunder  struck  blow  on  blow,  earth  groaned  and 

bore, 
Through  her  whole  length  of  mountain  visible  : 
There  lay  the  city  thick  and  plain  with  spires, 
And,  like  a  ghost  disshrouded,  white  the  sea. 
So  may  the  truth  be  flashed  out  by  one  blow, 
And  Guido  see,  one  instant,  and  be  saved." 

Still  more  striking  is  the  lovely  story  of  Pippa, 
the  little  silk-winder  of  Asolo.  It  is  New  Year's 
day,  her  one  holiday  in  the  whole  long  year  — 

"  To-morrow  I  must  be  Pippa  who  winds  silk 
The  whole  year  round,  to  earn  just  bread  and  milk : 
But,  this  one  day,  I  have  leave  to  go, 
And  play  out  my  fancy's  fullest  games  ;  " 

and  so  she  wanders  forth  into  the  sunshine, 
singing  as  she  goes.  First  she  passes,  in  the 
morning,  the  house  on  the  hillside,  where  the 
guilty  pair,  Ottima  and  her  lover  Sebald,  are 
met ;  then,  at  noon  she  reaches  the  house  to 
which  this  day  Jules  the  sculptor  will  bring 
home  his  bride ;  in  the  evening  she  is  near 


162      THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION 

the  turret  on  the  hill  above  Asolo  where 
dwell  Luigi  and  his  mother ;  and  at  night  she 
passes  the  palace  by  the  Duomo  in  which 
Monsignor  the  Bishop  is  conferring  with  his 
Intendant.  Pippa  does  not  know  it,  but  to 
each  of  these  a  great  crisis  has  come ;  each  is 
standing  at  the  parting  of  the  ways  ;  "  Ottima 
and  Sebald  unrepentant,  with  a  crime  behind 
them ;  Jules  and  Phene,  two  souls  brought 
strangely  face  to  face  by  a  fate  which  may 
prove  their  salvation  or  their  perdition ; 
Luigi,  irresolute,  with  a  purpose  to  be  per- 
formed ;  Monsignor,  undecided,  before  a 
great  temptation."  1  And  as  Pippa  passes, 
singing,  something  in  the  song  wakens  within 
each  the  slumbering  better  self,  and  each  is 
saved.     Let  Sebald  speak  for  the  rest. 

"  God's  in  His  heaven, 
All's  right  with  the  world  !  " 

— this  was  Pippa's  song,  and  this  is  Sebald's 
answer  : 

"  That  little  peasant's  voice 

Has  righted  all  again.     Though  I  be  lost, 

1  Arthur  Symons'  Introduction  to  Browning,  p.  48. 


THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      1 63 

I  know  which  is  the  better,  never  fear, 

Of  vice  or  virtue,  purity  or  lust, 

Nature  or  trick  ;  I  see  what  I  have  done, 

Entirely  now  !     Oh,  I  am  proud  to  feel 

Such  torments — let  the  world  take  credit  thence— 

I,  having  done  my  deed,  pay  too  its  price  ! 

.     .     .     God's  in  His  heaven  !  " 

This  is  what  the  poetry  of  Browning  says 
everywhere,  that  as  Prof.  Corson  puts  it 
— "  not  through  knowledge,  not  through  a 
sharpened  intellect,  but  through  repentance, 
through  conversion,  through  wheeling  into  a 
new  centre  its  spiritual  system,  the  soul  at- 
tains to  saving  truth."  l 

Nor  does  Browning  ever  forget — how 
could  he  ?  — that  the  master  forces  of  life  are 
personal ;  hence  what  he  shows  us  is  not  con- 
version simply,  but  conversion  through  per- 
sonality. One  illustration  must  suffice.  Take 
the  story  of  Giuseppe  Caponsacchi  in  The 
Ring  and  the  Book.  Caponsacchi  was  a 
priest,  and  withal  a  coxcomb  and  a  fribble ; 
the  Church's  holy  hands  had  left  unchanged  J 
the  worldling's  withered  heart.  Then  Pom- ' 
pilia — Guido's   wronged   but   stainless   girl- 

1  Introduction  to  Browning,  p.  58. 


1 64      THE   RATIONALE   OF  CONVERSION 

wife — crossed  his  path,  laid  her  commands 
on  him,  and  trusted  him ;  and  Caponsacchi 
became  a  new  man.  This  is  how  he  tells 
what  happened  to  his  judges  : 

"'Thought?'  nay,  Sirs,   what  shall  follow  was  not 

thought : 
I  have  thought  sometimes,  and  thought  long  and 

hard. 
I  have  stood  before,  gone  round  a  serious  thing, 
Tasked  my  whole  mind  to  touch  and  clasp  it  close, 
As  I  stretch  forth  my  arm  to  touch  this  bar. 
God  and  man,  and  what  duty  I  owe  both, — 
I  dare  to  say  I  have  confronted  these 
In  thought :  but  no  such  faculty  helped  here. 
I  put  forth  no  thought, — powerless,  all  that  night 
I  paced  the  city  :  it  was  the  first  Spring. 
By  the  invasion  I  lay  passive  to, 
In  rush'd  new  things,  the  old  were  rapt  away ; 
Alike  abolished — the  imprisonment 
Of  the  outside  air,  the  inside  weight  o'  the  world 
That  pulled  me  down.     Death  meant,  to  spurn  the 

ground, 
Soar  to  the  sky, — die  well  and  you  do  that. 


Sirs,  I  obeyed.     Obedience  was  too  strange, - 
This  new  thing  that  had  been  struck  into  me 
By  the  look  o'  the  lady, — to  dare  disobey 
The  first  authoritative  word.     'Twas  God's. 
I  had  been  lifted  to  the  level  of  her, 


THE  RATIONALE  OF  CONVERSION      1 65 

Could  take  such  sounds  into  my  sense.     I  said 
'  We  two  are  cognizant  o*  the  Master  now ; 
She  it  is  bids  me  bow  the  head ;  how  true, 
I  am  a  priest !  I  see  the  function  here ; 
I  thought  the  other  way  self-sacrifice  : 
This  is  the  true,  seals  up  the  perfect  sum. 
I  pay  it,  sit  down,  silently  obey.'  " 

Browning,  it  is  plain,  is  not  afraid  of  sud- 
den spiritual  upheavals  ;  he  believes  in  them  ; 
the  tiniest  spark  may  fire  the  brain,  and  in 
the  shock  which  follows 

"  God  unmakes  but  to  remake  the  soul 
He  else  made  first  in  vain." 

In  all  this,  once  more  let  it  be  said,  there 
is  no  clearing  up  of  the  mystery  of  conver- 
sion. When  we  compare  what  happens  in 
conversion  with  the  sudden  re-direction  that 
is  given  to  a  life  by  some  chance  incident, 
we  are  but  comparing  one  mystery  with  an- 
other, and  each  remains  a  mystery  still.  Of 
many  of  these  changes,  perhaps  no  other 
reason  can  be  given  than  that  Nature  and  the 
Author  of  Nature  have  made  men  capable  of 
them.  And  yet,  at  the  same  time,  this  cor- 
relating of  the  experiences  of  religion  with 


166      THE   RATIONALE   OF   CONVERSION 

some  of  the  familiar  experiences  of  life  may 
not  be  in  vain.  It  may  teach  us  to  see  in  the 
phenomena  of  the  spiritual  world,  not  the 
portents  of  some  almighty  magician,  but  the 
activities  of  the  same  divine  mind  which  is  at 
work  in  all  our  life.  Mysterious  they  will 
still  remain,  but  not  more  mysterious  than 
many  other  things  before  which  we  daily 
stand  with  thankful  hearts  and  bowed  heads 
— thankful  yet  silent : 

/  was  dumb,  I  opened  not  my  mouth  ; 

Because  Thou  didst  it. 


LECTURE  V 

THE  PSYCHOLOGY 
OF  CONVERSION 


LECTURE  V 
THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

REFERENCE  was  made  in  a  former 
lecture  to  the  claim  upon  science  of 
the  facts  of  the  religious  conscious- 
ness, and  to  the  response  which  that  claim  is 
winning  to-day  from  many  distinguished  stu- 
dents of  psychology.1  The  movement  to 
which  I  refer,  recent  as  it  is,  is  attracting  at- 
tention in  so  many  quarters,  and  promises  to 
yield  such  an  abundant  literary  crop,  that  it 
seems  worth  while  pausing  to  ask  what  aid 
it  can  give  us  in  our  interpretation  of  the 
facts  which  form  the  subject  matter  of  these 
lectures. 

I 
Let  me  begin  with  a  brief  account  of  the 
aims,  methods,  and  results  of  the  new  psy- 
chological study  of  religion.     It  assumes  that 
religion  is  a  real  fact  of  human  experience, 

1  See  p.  54. 
169 


170     THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

and  that  it  develops  according  to  law. 
"  Here,"  it  says,  in  effect,  "  in  the  experiences 
of  men  and  women  about  us  is  a  great  mass 
of  ascertainable  states  of  consciousness. 
These  it  is  the  business  of  science  to  observe 
with  all  the  precision  that  modern  psycholog- 
ical methods  render  possible.  To  under- 
stand religion  we  must  study  it  in  its  present 
manifestations."  In  making  this  inquiry  the 
psychologist  is  concerned  solely  with  the 
facts  as  such  ;  their  ultimate  significance  lies 
wholly  without  the  scope  of  his  judgment.  He 
rejects  equally  the  position  of  those  to  whom 
conversion  is  an  absolutely  supernatural 
event  with  nothing  cognate  to  it  in  ordinary 
psychology,  and  of  those  who  see  nothing  in 
it  but  hysterics  and  emotionalism,  an  abso- 
lutely pernicious  pathological  disturbance. 
His  one  aim  is  to  trace  in  the  facts  of  the 
spiritual  life  the  working  of  those  same 
orderly  processes  which  experience  has 
taught  him  to  look  for  everywhere ;  and 
while  he  does  not  forget  that  the  laws  of  the 
spiritual  world  are  peculiar  to  their  own 
sphere,  and  are  therefore  not  necessarily  one 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION      171 

with  those  which  obtain  in  other  spheres,  he 
nevertheless  believes  that  the  facts  have  an 
order  which  in  due  time  will  reveal  itself  to 
the  patient  seeker. 

In  pursuing  his  inquiry  the  psychologist 
claims  for  his  own  the  whole  field  of  religious 
experience.  Hitherto,  however,  it  is  upon  the 
phenomena  of  conversion  that  his  most  abun- 
dant labours  have  been  bestowed,  and  it  is, 
of  course,  with  the  results  of  these  alone  that 
we  are  at  this  moment  concerned.  Keeping 
before  him  the  whole  series  of  manifestations 
just  preceding,  accompanying,  and  imme- 
diately following  conversion,  the  psychologist 
seeks  to  discover  the  mental  and  spiritual 
processes  which  are  at  work  therein.  As  we 
might  expect,  his  attention  is  especially  drawn 
to  the  manifold  varieties  of  conversion  which 
were  the  subject  of  an  earlier  lecture,  and,  as 
we  shall  see  in  a  moment,  he  believes  he  holds, 
from  the  human  side,  the  only  clue  to  the 
problem  which  they  present  to  us.1 

1  These  paragraphs  are  merely  a  summary  of  the  aims  of  the 
psychological  study  of  religion  as  these  are  set  forth  in  the 
writings  of  Coe,  Starbuck,  and  James. 


172      THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

In  order  to  obtain  the  facts  which  form  the 
raw  material  for  the  investigation,  various 
methods  have  been  adopted.  The  biogra- 
phies and  autobiographies  of  religious  persons 
have  been  examined  (every  one  will  remem- 
ber how  largely  these  figure  in  the  lectures 
of  Prof.  James);  individual  converts  have 
been  interrogated  as  to  their  experiences, 
and  the  results  recorded.  Prof.  Coe  tells  us 
that  he  had  a  number  of  persons  placed  un- 
der careful  scrutiny  with  a  view  to  securing 
objective  evidence  as  to  temperament,  the 
observers  being  guided  by  a  carefully  pre- 
pared scheme  of  temperamental  manifesta- 
tions.1 In  some  cases  further  aid  was  sought 
by  means  of  interviews  with  friends  or  ac- 
quaintances of  the  persons  under  examina- 
tion. The  method  most  commonly  adopted, 
however,  is  that  of  the  questionnaire,  as  it  is 
called.  By  means  of  an  elaborate  and  care- 
fully prepared  list  of  questions  (examples  of 
which  may  be  seen  in  many  of  the  works  re- 
ferred to  in  this  lecture)  a  detailed  description 
is  obtained  from  hundreds  of  persons  of  their 

»  The  Spiritual  Life,  p.  109. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION      1 73 

conversion  experiences,  the  motives  that  led 
up  to  it,  the  circumstances  that  attended  it, 
and  the  effects  that  followed  from  it.  These 
descriptions  are  then  analyzed  and  the  re- 
sults are  grouped  and  massed  in  various 
ways  so  as  to  exhibit  averages  and  tendencies 
in  religious  life. 

The  movement,  as  I  have  said,  is  still  but 
in  its  infancy.  One  of  the  first  to  break 
ground  in  this  new  field  was  Prof.  Leuba, 
whose  article  on  "The  Psychology  of  Re- 
ligious Phenomena,"  appeared  in  The  Ameri- 
can Journal  of  Psychology,  in  April,  1896. 
Prof.  Starbuck's  similar  but  much  more 
elaborate  investigations — The  Psychology  of 
Religion — were  published  in  1899.  In  1900 
came  Prof.  G.  A.  Coe's  Spiritual  Life, 
and  in  1902  Prof.  James'  Varieties  of  Re- 
ligious Experience,  which  my  predecessor  in 
this  lectureship  (Dr.  Watson)  once  spoke  of 
as  "  the  most  scientific  book  on  the  phenom- 
ena of  the  religious  consciousness  which  has 
ever  been  published."  All  these,  it  will  be 
observed,  are  the  work  of  American  students. 
From  Prof.  Henri  Bois  of  Montauban,  I  ob- 


174     THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

serve,  have  just  come  two  volumes,  one  on 
the  Welsh  Revival,  the  other  on  the  Psychol- 
ogy of  Revivals  ;  but  of  these  I  am  not  able 
to  speak.1  British  scholarship,  so  far  as  I  am 
aware,  has  not  yet  entered  the  field.2 

And  what  are  the  results  of  this  study  of 
conversion  by  the  methods  of  psychology? 
I  can  answer  the  question  only  in  the  baldest 
and  most  summary  fashion.  Keeping  stead- 
ily in  view  their  task  of  coordinating  specific 
inner  states  and  tendencies  and  specific  ex- 
ternal circumstances,  students  of  the  psychol- 
ogy of  religious  experiences  believe  they  have 
reached  at  least  two  well-established  con- 
clusions. In  the  first  place,  they  tell  us,  that 
when  in  conversion  a  man's  personality  is 
changed,  it  is,  as  Prof.  James  would  say, 
his  psychological  idiosyncrasies  which  give 
the  particular  shape  to  his  metamorphosis. 
Suppose    converting   influences   brought   to 


1  See  a  short  notice  by  Dr.  James  Stalker  in  The  Expository 
Times,  January,  1908. 

*  I  have  not  overlooked  Mr.  Frank  Granger's  Soul  of  a  Chris- 
tian; but  though,  like  R.  L.  Stevenson's  Child  World,  it  is 
"  full  of  a  number  of  things,"  and  these  often  very  interesting, 
it  does  not  seem  to  me  to  add  materially  to  the  discussion. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION      J75 

bear  upon  one  in  whom  these  three  facti 
combine :  pronounced  emotional  sensibility, 
tendency  to  automatisms,  and  susceptibility 
to  hypnotic  suggestion — if  he  yield,  you  may 
confidently  predict  that  such  a  man  will  ex- 
perience a  transformation  of  the  sudden  and 
striking  order.  In  the  degree,  however,  in 
which  these  characteristics  are  wanting,  the 
likelihood  of  his  passing  through  a  change  of 
this  marked  character  is  reduced,  no  matter 
what  the  depth  and  reality  of  his  religious  con- 
victions. In  a  word — such  is  Prof.  Coe's 
conclusion — the  varying  emotional  aspects 
of  our  religious  experiences  are  to  be  ascribed 
not  to  the  inscrutable  ways  of  God,  but  to 
ascertainable  differences  in  men's  mental 
constitutions.1  Prof.  James  reaches  prac- 
tically the  same  conclusion,  though  he  states 
it  somewhat  differently:  " What  makes  the 
difference  between  a  sudden  and  a  gradual 
convert  is  not  necessarily  the  presence  of 
divine  miracle  in  the  case  of  one  and  of  some- 
thing less  divine  in  that  of  the  other,  but 
rather  a  simple  psychological  peculiarity,  the 

1  The  Spiritual  Life,  p.  140. 


176      TViE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION 

fpitt,  namely,  that  in  the  recipient  of  the  more 
instantaneous  grace  we  have  one  of  those 
subjects  who  are  in  possession  of  a  large  re- 
gion in  which  mental  work  can  go  on  sub- 
liminally,  and  from  which  invasive  expe- 
riences, abruptly  upsetting  the  equilib- 
rium of  the  primary  consciousness,  may 
come."  l 

Another  matter  upon  which  modern  psy- 
chology pronounces  with  equal  confidence  is 
the  intimate  correspondence  which  has  been 
shown  to  exist  between  conversion  and  those 
momentous  physical  and  mental  changes 
which  mark  the  passing  of  childhood  into 
youth  and  manhood.  Returns  of  the  various 
ages  at  which  conversion  takes  place  have 
been  secured  on  a  considerable  scale  by 
different  investigators,  and  though,  of  course, 
the  results  do  not  always  agree,  certain  con- 
clusions stand  out  with  well-defined  clearness : 
that  conversion  takes  place  usually  between 
the  ages  of  ten  and  twenty-five,  most  fre- 
quently about  sixteen  or  seventeen,  very 
rarely  after  thirty,  and  on  an  average,  some- 

1  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  237. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF   CONVERSION      177 

what  earlier  in  girls  than  in  boys.1  In  other 
words,  the  critical  period  in  religious  devel- 
opment is  seen  to  coincide  in  a  very  remark- 
able degree  with  the  storm  and  stress  of  ado- 
lescence. Indeed,  many  psychologists,  be- 
lieving that  man  is  naturally  religious,  look 
upon  the  religious  anxieties  of  youth  as  one 
of  the  normal  manifestations  of  the  adolescent 
period.  The  well-known  uneasiness  and  fer- 
ment of  the  physical  life  have  their  correlate 
in  the  scarcely  less  familiar  upheavals  and 
agonies  of  the  spiritual. 

II 
This  brief  outline,  woefully  inadequate  as 
it  is,  may  serve  to  indicate  some  of  the  re- 
sults for  religion  of  recent  psychological  re- 
search. What,  now,  is  to  be  our  attitude,  as 
Christians,  towards  this  new  study  ?  To  say 
that  we  will  not  oppose  it  will  probably  only 
provoke  from  science  the  prompt  retort, 
"Thank  you  for  nothing  1"  Certain  it  is, 
whether  we  like  it  or  dislike  it,  the  study  will 

1  Elaborate  statistics  and  diagrams  may  be  found  in  the 
works  of  Starbuck  and  Coe.  See  also  Pratt's  Psychology  of  Re- 
ligious Belief,  p.  2 1 8. 


17g       THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION 

go  on  as  long  as  it  holds  out  to  the  inquirer 
the  smallest  promise  of  reward  for  his  labours. 
Nothing  short  of  an  absolute  conviction  that 
he  was  ploughing  the  sands  of  the  seashore 
would  or  ought  to  induce  him  to  stay  his 
hand.  But,  indeed,  religion  not  only  has  no 
interest  in  opposing  the  application  of  the 
methods  of  psychology  to  the  facts  of  the 
spiritual  life,  she  had  every  reason  for  wel- 
coming and  encouraging  it.  Has  it  not  been 
a  just  ground  of  complaint  with  us  that  science, 
which  is  so  quick  to  seize  upon  all  other  facts, 
has  treated  our  facts — the  facts  of  the  re- 
ligious consciousness — with  cold  disdain  ?  It 
would  be  strange  indeed,  therefore,  if  now 
that  in  real  earnest  and  according  to  her  own 
proper  methods  she  is  taking  up  the  task,  re- 
ligion were  to  cry  "  Hands  off ! "  or  to  persist 
in  regarding  her  as  an  unauthorized  intruder. 
Nor  need  we  fear  lest,  in  passing  through 
the  hands  and  under  the  eyes  of  the  psychol- 
ogist, spiritual  facts  should  lose  any  of  their 
essential  significance.  What  happens  in 
conversion  is  not  less  divine  after  science  has 
given  such  account  of  it  as  it  can  than  it  was 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION      1 79 

before.  Suppose,  e.  gJ  we  accept  the  psy- 
chologist's conclusions  as  to  the  possible  sub- 
jects of  a  sudden  and  striking  religious  trans- 
formation, are  we  therefore  shut  up  to  the 
further  conclusion  that  the  whole  change  is 
explicable  in  terms  of  emotional  sensibility 
and  so  forth?  Certainly  not.  The  utmost 
that  has  been  proved  is  that  a  certain  type  of 
man  is  necessary  to  a  certain  type  of  con- 
version ;  but  (as  Prof.  Coe  well  says)  the 
substance  of  the  experience  as  far  transcends 
its  emotional  forms  as  a  man  transcends  the 
clothes  he  wears.1  Or,  suppose  again,  science 
should  succeed  in  demonstrating  the  concomi- 
tance which  it  believes  to  exist  between  con- 
version and  the  crisis  of  adolescence,  would 
the  legitimate  inference  be  that  conversion  is 
merely  a  product  of  physical  factors  ?  Again 
we  answer,  certainly  not.     All  that  science  is 

1  So  also  Prof.  James :  "  His  possession  of  a  developed 
subliminal  self,  and  of  a  leaky  or  pervious  margin,  is  thus  a 
conditio  sine  qua  non  of  the  Subject's  becoming  converted  in  the 
instantaneous  way.  But  if  you,  being  orthodox  Christians,  ask 
me  as  a  psychologist  whether  the  reference  of  a  phenomenon 
to  a  subliminal  self  does  not  exclude  the  notion  of  the  direct 
presence  of  the  Deity  altogether,  I  have  to  say  frankly  that  as 
a  psychologist  I  do  not  see  why  it  necessarily  should."    (P.  342.) 


180      THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION 

seeking  to  prove  is  the  concomitance  of  two 
groups  of  facts  and  (to  quote  Prof.  Coe 
again)  this  particular  instance  of  such  con- 
comitance between  mental  and  physical  facts 
is  no  more  fitted  to  give  comfort  to  ma- 
terialism than  any  other  instance  of  the  cor- 
relation of  brain  states  with  mental  states.1 
What  science  looks  for  among  the  facts  of 
the  spiritual  world  is  that  which  it  looks  for 
everywhere — the  signs  of  law  and  order.  If 
these  should  be  found  here  also,  will  the  facts 
therefore  be  less  truly  God's  facts  ?  .Are  we 
going  to  commit  ourselves  once  more  to  the 
old  and  stupid  notion,  "the  more  law  and 
order  the  less  God,"  l  that  it  is  only  the  ab- 
normal that  is  divine,  that  the  moment  you 
can  account  for  anything  that  moment  you 
withdraw  it  from  the  sphere  of  the  divine  ac- 
tivity? Things  are  what  they  are,  however 
they  came  to  be  what  they  are ;  and  divine 
things  are  not  less  divine  because  the  history 
of  their  development  turns  out  to  be  different 
from  what  we  once  thought  it.     The  world  in 

1  The  Spiritual  Life,  p.  47. 
'  The  phrase  is  Dr.  Bowne's. 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION      l8l 

which  we  live  is  not  the  world  that  Dante 
and  Milton  knew,  but  it  is  still  God's  world. 
The  Bible  that  we  read  is  different  from  the 
Bible  of  the  Reformers,  but  it  is  still  God's 
Word.  And  if  in  the  facts  of  conversion  and 
regeneration  our  children  are  led  to  trace  the 
sequence  of  laws  which  are  hidden  from  our 
eyes,  why  should  we  doubt  that  still  behind 
all  there  is  the  same  divine  Lord  who  worketh 
all  things  according  to  the  good  pleasure  of 
His  will? 

It  is  only  fair  to  add  that  psychologists 
who  are  most  active  in  this  new  field  of  in- 
quiry energetically  repudiate  the  idea  that 
these  conclusions  can  in  any  way  affect  the 
reality  of  the  divine  agency  in  conversion. 
Let  Prof.  Coe  speak  both  for  himself  and 
his  fellow  workers.:  "  Empirical  methods  do 
not  reduce  the  facts  of  the  religious  life  to  the 
plane  of  the  natural  as  contrasted  with  the 
supernatural.  Every  question  arising  in  the 
psychology  of  religious  experience  may  be 
understood  in  this  way :  Under  what  cir- 
cumstances does  the  divine  Spirit  work  such 
or  such  a  change  in  the  minds  of  men  ?    That 


182      THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION 

the  Holy  Spirit  does  observe  antecedents  and 
wait  for  conditions  to  ripen  ;  that  He  does 
not  vouchsafe  the  same  blessings  to  all  indi- 
viduals or  to  all  ages  of  life ;  and  that  we 
have  it  in  our  power  either  to  prepare  the 
way  for  His  revelations  or  to  hinder  them — 
all  this  is  current  belief  among  Christians. 
Now,  these  are  the  very  uniformities  that 
need  investigating.  In  fact,  psychology  can 
only  render  more  precise  and  complete  what 
is  already  recognized  in  a  partial  way  in  the 
practice  of  the  religious  life.  Yet  the  results 
will  not  be  doctrinal  in  the  ordinary  sense  of 
the  term.  They  will  be  merely  statements  of 
uniformities  existing  between  certain  ante- 
cedents and  certain  consequents  and  will 
leave  entirely  open  the  vast  field  of  questions 
regarding  the  divine  purposes  towards  men 
and  regarding  man's  real  nature  and 
destiny." ' 

III 
While,   however,  it  is  our  plain  duty  to 
abandon  all  attempts  in  the  name  of  religion 

1  The  Spiritual  Life,  p.  17.  See  also  p.  1 18;  Cutten's  Psy- 
chology of  Alcoholism,  p.  317,  and  the  passage  from  James 
quoted  above. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION      183 

to  browbeat  science  and  all  equally  foolish 
fears  of  it,  this  does  not  mean  that  we  are  to 
shut  our  eyes  and  open  our  mouths  and  take 
whatever  science,  or  science  falsely  so  called, 
may  be  pleased  to  give  us.  Least  of  all  has 
so  young  a  science  as  the  psychology  of  re- 
ligion any  right  of  complaint  if  its  first  ad- 
vances are  met  with  a  mild  and  reasonable 
scepticism.  Without  entering  into  detailed 
criticism  two  or  three  brief  notes  may  be 
added  to  show  the  need  at  this  stage  of  a 
cautious  if  sympathetic  attitude. 

(1)  To  begin  with,  there  is  the  fact  already 
alluded  to,  the  extreme  youth  of  the  science 
itself.  Perhaps,  indeed,  it  would  not  be  un- 
fair to  suggest  that  as  yet  it  is  not  a  science 
but  only  the  hope  of  one.  When  Prof. 
Leuba  wrote  his  article  on  "  The  Psychology 
of  •  Religious  Phenomena,"  as  recently  as 
1896,  he  declared  that  the  manifestations  of 
the  religious  life  were  a  domain  in  which  psy- 
chological science  had  not  then  planted  its 
standard.  When  Prof.  Starbuck,  then  a 
student  of  Harvard,  first  set  on  foot  his  sta- 
tistical inquiries  into  the  religious  ideas  and 


1 84     THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

experiences  of  the  people  around  him,  the 
results  of  which  have  since  been  given  to 
the  world,  even  Prof.  James  (as  he  himself 
has  confessed)  damned  the  whole  project  with 
faint  praise.1  "This  is  not  a  sphere,"  says 
Prof.  Coe,  "  in  which  claims  to  scientific  in- 
fallibility become  even  plausible."  2  More- 
over, the  investigators  are  as  yet  compara- 
tively few ;  American  students,  as  I  have 
said,  have  hitherto  had  the  field  almost  to 
themselves.  Any  one  who  has  the  slightest 
acquaintance  with  the  literature  of  the  subject 
must  have  been  struck  with  the  way  in  which 
the  writers  lean  one  upon  another.  Before 
the  results  of  their  labours  can  be  accepted 
with  complete  confidence  we  must  be  able 
to  check  them  by  the  findings  of  other  work- 
ers in  other  parts  of  the  same  field. 

(2)  We  cannot  help  feeling,  too,  that  the 
questionnaire  method  which  figures  so  largely 
in  these  investigations  is  a  somewhat  rickety 
foundation  for  the  weight  of  conclusions 
which  it  is  made  to  bear.     It  might,  indeed, 

1  See  his  Preface  to  Starbuck's  Psychology  of  Religion. 
*  The  Spiritual  Life,  p.  119. 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION      1 85 

seem  that  nothing  could  be  more  simple  and 
straightforward,  when  we  desire  to  know  the 
facts  of  religious  experience,  than  to  go  di- 
rect to  religious  people  themselves  and  let 
them  describe  in  their  own  way  their  own 
inner  life.  A  little  reflection,  however,  will 
show  us  that  comparatively  few  persons  are 
equal  to  the  task  of  accurate  self-observation 
and  portrayal.  So  far  from  being  an  art 
which  comes  naturally  to  every  one,  it  needs 
long  and  careful  cultivation  before  it  can  be 
trusted.  \  A  man  may  be  both  intellectually 
honest  and  religiously  sincere,  and  yet  as 
soon  as  he  attempts  to  read  off  in  detail  the 
facts  of  his  own  inner  life  he  may  be  the  un- 
conscious victim  of  all  manner  of  subtle  self- 
deceptions  :  the  conventionalities  of  religious 
formulae,  the  tricks  of  memory,  the  processes 
of  self-praise  and  self-blame — all  mean  so 
much  to  be  deducted  from  the  face  value 
of  his  account.  That  the  students  of  the 
psychology  of  religion  are  themselves  aware 
of  these  drawbacks  to  their  method  is 
true ;  whether,  in  their  conclusions,  they 
have   sufficiently   allowed    for    them    is    a 


1 86      THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

question    on   which   opinions   are   likely  to 
differ. 

(3)  But  the  most  serious  criticism,  from 
the  point  of  view  of  religion,  of  the  psycho- 
logical study  of  religious  experience  is — to 
put  it  bluntly — that  it  is  just  the  religious 
element  in  the  experiences  which  it  analyzes 
about  which  psychology  has  nothing  to  say. 
Prof.  James  calls  his  book  "  The  Varieties 
of  Religious  Experience,"  and  yet  it  would 
hardly  be  unfair  to  say  that  he  does  not  deal 
with  religious  experience  at  all.  A  man  may 
fill  reams  of  paper  in  discussing  the  emotional 
factors  which  combined  to  make  possible  the 
experience  which  befel  St.  Paul  on  the  road 
to  Damascus,  but  if  he  ignore  the  central 
facts  of  divine  forgiveness  and  fellowship 
which  became  the  strength  of  the  Apostle's 
life  and  the  source  of  all  his  activities,  he  has 
left  out  the  only  elements  in  the  experience 
to  which  a  Christian  at  least  would  give  the 
name  "  religious  "  at  all.  And,  with  all  his 
cleverness,  it  must  be  confessed  this  is  what 
Prof.  James  seems  to  have  done.  This 
unconcern  about  everything  save  the  mere 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION      187 

fringes  of  religious  emotionalism,  comes  out 
in  various  ways.  Critics  of  Prof.  James' 
book  have  often  complained  of  the  unhappy 
prominence  which  he  gives  to  abnormal  and 
sometimes  grotesque  developments  of  the  re- 
ligious life.  But  if  we  remember  the  psy- 
chologist's point  of  view  this  is  only  just  what 
we  might  expect.  Prof.  Leuba,  e.g.,  says 
plainly  that  in  selecting  the  material  by 
which  to  illustrate  his  conclusions  he  limited 
himself  "  to  sudden  and  well-marked  cases," 
for  this  reason,  "that  violent  psychic  phe- 
nomena by  their  very  emphasis  bring  to  light 
what  remains  obscure  in  less  intense  and 
slower  events."1  Exactly;  but  a  "sudden 
and  well-marked"  case  of  conversion  has 
Per  se  no  more  religious  value  than  any  other 
kind  of  conversion,  and  the  only  reason  why 
it  is  of  more  worth  to  the  psychologist  is  that 
it  throws  into  sharper  relief  the  purely  psy- 
chic factors  which  are  his  first  and  last  con- 
cern. A  short  paragraph  from  one  of 
Prof.  James'  lectures  will,  I  think,  put  this 
beyond  dispute  :  "  To  find  religion,"  he  says, 

1  Essay  referred  to  above,  p.  312. 


y 


1 88      THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION 

"  is  only  one  out  of  many  ways  of  reaching 
unity ;  and  the  process  of  remedying  inner 
incompleteness  and  reducing  inner  discord  is 
a  general  psychological  process,  which  may 
take  place  with  any  sort  of  mental  material 
and  need  not  necessarily  assume  the  religious 
form.  In  judging  of  the  religious  types  of 
regeneration  which  we  are  about  to  study,  it 
is  important  to  recognize  that  they  are  only 
one  species  of  a  genus  that  contains  other 
types  as  well.  For  example,  the  new  birth 
may  be  away  from  religion  into  incredulity  ; 
or  it  may  be  from  moral  scrupulosity  into 
freedom  and  license  ;  or  it  may  be  produced 
by  the  irruption  into  the  individual's  life  of 
some  new  stimulus  or  passion,  such  as  love, 
ambition,  cupidity,  revenge,  or  patriotic  de- 
votion. In  all  these  instances  we  have  pre- 
cisely the  same  psychological  form  of  event, 
— a  firmness,  stability,  and  equilibrium  suc- 
ceeding a  period  of  storm  and  stress  and  in- 
consistency. In  these  non-religious  cases  the 
new  man  may  also  be  born  either  gradually 
or  suddenly."1    iThe  meaning  of  this  is  un- 

1  Varieties  of  Religious  Experience,  p.  175. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION      189 

mistakable,  and  it  abundantly  confirms  what 
has  already  been  said,  viz.,  that  psychology 
deals  only  with  those  elements  in  religious 
experiences  which  are  common  to  them  and 
other  experiences,  but  that  that  in  them  which 
gives  them  their  distinctive  character  and 
their  whole  value — the  religious  element,  i.  e.t 
—lies  wholly  outside  its  province. 

IV 

Must  we  conclude,  therefore,  that  faith  has 
in  this  matter  nothing  to  learn  from  science  ? 
I  do  not  think  so.  I  proceed,  therefore,  in 
this  closing  section  of  my  lecture,  very  briefly 
to  indicate  some  of  the  gains  by  which  psy- 
chology promises  to  enrich  religion. 

(1)  It  is  something  that  we  have  secured 
so  stalwart  a  witness  to  the  fact  that  man  is 
essentially  a  religious  being.  There  was  a 
time,  and  that  not  so  long  ago,  when  even  to 
well-instructed  men  it  seemed  a  sufficient  ac- 
count of  religion  to  set  it  down  as  an  inven- 
tion of  priests.  In  Gibbon's  eyes  all  religions 
were  equally  useful  for  the  statesman  and 
equally  false  for  the  philosopher.    Psychology 


190     THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

has  done  its  part  in  helping  to  make  an  end  of 
all  such  crudities  of  thought  for  the  future. 
We  know  now  that  religion  is  not  a  some- 
thing imposed  by  authority  from  without; 
it  is  from  within,  a  growth  of  the  spirit,  as 
native  to  the  soul  of  man  as  his  sense  of 
wonder  or  his  instinct  for  society.  Set  your- 
self to  answer  the  question,  "  What  is  man?" 
and  psychology  will  say  to  you  that  if  you 
answer  the  question  in  any  way  that  leaves 
out  the  religious  manifestations  of  arrival  at 
adult  life,  you  beg  the  answer  by  ignoring 
the  most  palpable  facts.1  Many  of  you  will 
recall  a  striking  essay  in  which  Mr.  John 
Fiske,  speaking  as  an  evolutionist,  declares 
his  belief  that  of  all  the  implications  of  the 
doctrine  of  evolution  with  regard  to  man, 
the  very  deepest  and  strongest  is  that 
which  asserts  the  everlasting  reality  of  re- 
ligion.2 It  is  a  kindred  testimony  which  in 
its  own  different  fashion  is  born  by  modern 
psychology. 

(2)     But   it   is,  probably,   in   the   field   of 

« The  Spiritual  Life,  p.  54. 

*  Through  Nature  to  God,  p.  191. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION      191 

practical  Christian  work  that  the  value  of  the 
new  study  of  religion  will  be  most  clearly- 
seen.  Take,  e.  g.t  its  insistence  on  the  inti- 
mate relation  between  general  temperamental 
characteristics  and  particular  types  of  re- 
ligious experience.  The  sudden,  explosive 
conversion,  and  the  conversion  which  is 
rather  a  process  than  an  event,  have  each 
alike  their  psychological  justification  ;  by  in- 
ference, so  likewise  have  the  religious 
methods  adopted  to  bring  each  about. 
Once  this  truth  is  clearly  seen  and  firmly 
grasped  we  may  expect  that  it  will  work 
out  a  twofold  result  of  great  practical 
importance.  On  the  one  hand,  it  will  help 
to  remove  a  very  real  stumbling-block  from 
the  feet  of  some  for  whom  a  single  type  of 
conversion,  and  that  for  them  an  impossible 
type,  has  the  authority  of  a  universal  stand- 
ard. And,  on  the  other  hand,  evangelists 
and  other  Christian  workers  will  realize,  with 
a  certain  sense  of  relief,  that  the  strongly 
marked  experiences  of  many  converts  are  not 
to  be  sought  for  in  all;  and  further,  they 
will  learn  to  look  with  thankful  rather  than 


192      THE  PSYCHOLOGY   OF  CONVERSION 

with  suspicious  eyes  on  methods  of  Christian 
work  which  seek  the  same  goal  but  reach  it 
by  different  paths.1 

(3)  Not  less  timely  is  the  new  emphasis 
with  which  psychology  proclaims  to  us  the 
significance  for  religion  of  the  period  of 
adolescence.  The  general  findings  of  inves- 
tigators in  this  matter  have  already  been 
given.  "  Conversion,"  says  Starbuck,  "  is  a 
distinctively  adolescent  phenomenon  "  ;  and 
he  even  goes  so  far  as  to  add  that  if  it  has 
not  occurred  before  twenty  the  chances  are 
small  that  it  will  ever  be  experienced.2  Now, 
in  a  way,  we  have  always  known  these 
things.  We  have  always  known  that  youth 
is  the  formative  period,  that  in  youth  all  the 
great  life  choices  are  made.  Most  men 
settle  what  their  life-work  is  to  be  before 
they  are  out  of  their  teens ;  and,  what  is  of 

1I  take  the  opportunity,  in  this  connection,  of  calling  atten- 
tion to  a  pamphlet  entitled  Christian  Training  and  the  Revival 
as  Methods  of  Converting  Men,  by  the  President  of  Oberlin 
College,  Dr.  H.  C.  King.  The  clearness  with  which  Dr. 
King  sees,  and  the  firmness  with  which  he  handles,  some  of 
the  most  urgent  practical  problems  of  the  modern  Church  is  be- 
yond praise. 

2  The  Psychology  of  Religion,  p.  28. 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION      1 93 

equal  and  sometimes  greater  importance, 
most  men  have  chosen  their  life  partner  be- 
fore they  are  half  way  through  their  twenties. 
It  is  only  natural,  therefore,  that  the  crises  of 
personal  religious  history  should  be  looked 
for  within  this  same  period.  Just  as— if  I 
may  borrow  a  homely  illustration — when  it 
is  desired  that  the  fire  in  a  furnace  should 
burn  more  briskly,  we  open  the  draught  door 
and  thereby  admit  the  oxygen  which  has  all 
along  been  enveloping  the  furnace  and  only 
waiting  for  an  opportunity  to  be  used  in  the 
work  of  combustion,  so  physical  changes  oc- 
curring at  adolescence  while  they  do  not  pro- 
duce religion,  do,  nevertheless,  open  new 
doors  whereby  the  ever-present  divine  Spirit 
may  enter  the  mind  and  heart  more  fully 
than  ever  before.1  In  a  way,  I  say,  we  have 
always  known  this.  Now  comes  psychology 
to  strengthen  our  convictions  with  the  con- 
firmations of  science,  to  tell  us  that  it  is  in 
the  yeasty  days  of  youth  that  the  Church's 
great  opportunity  comes,  and  to  warn  us, 
with  a  new   solemnity  of  emphasis,  of  the 

1  The  illustration  is  Prof.  Coe's. 


194     THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

risks     we     run    if    the    opportunity   be    let 
slip. 

(4)  Finally,  psychology  is  teaching  us  the 
need  of  a  more  patient  and  individual  study 
of  the  nature  of  the  soul  to  which,  through 
the  offices  of  religion,  we  seek  to  minister. 
As  long  ago  as  1873  Henry  Drummond  read 
an  essay  before  a  Theological  Society  in 
Edinburgh  in  which  he  maintained  that  the 
study  of  the  soul  in  health  and  disease  ought 
to  be  as  much  an  object  of  scientific  study 
and  training  as  the  health  and  diseases  of  the 
body.  "  To  draw  souls  one  by  one,  to  but- 
tonhole them  and  steal  from  them  the  secret 
of  their  lives,  to  talk  them  clean  out  of  them- 
selves, to  read  them  off  like  a  page  of  print, 
to  pervade  them  with  your  spiritual  essence 
and  make  them  transparent,  this,"  he  said, 
"  is  the  spiritual  science  which  is  so  difficult 
to  acquire  and  so  hard  to  practice."  l  We 
have  been  too  apt  to  assume  that  earnestness 
could  compensate  for  ignorance,  that  a  warm 
heart  could  make  good  the  deficiencies  of  an 
untaught  hand.     One  trembles  to  think  of 

1  The  New  Evangelism,  pp.  191-3. 


THE  PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION      1 95 

the  souls  that  have  perished  at  the  birth  be- 
cause, in  that  supreme  hour,  they  had  no 
better  care  than  uninstructed  zeal  could  give. 
Souls  that  are  sick  have  need  of  a  physician, 
of  a  physician  fitted  alike  by  sympathy  and 
skill  to  divine  their  needs  and  to  minister  to 
them.  But  alas  !  the  physicians  of  religious 
perplexity  have  too  often  been  Job's  com- 
forters, without  understanding;  and  so  the 
souls  in  doubt  who,  as  one  has  well  said, 
should  have  been  gathered  to  the  heart  of  the 
Church  with  as  much  pity  and  care  as  the 
penitent  or  the  mourner,  have  been  scorned 
and  cursed  and  driven  away.  But,  as  the 
more  accurate,  if  less  familiar,  rendering  has 
it,  He  that  is  wise  winneth  souls.  Souls  have 
to  be  won,  and  wisdom  is  needed  to  win 
them.  Have  the  physicians  of  the  soul  less 
need  to  know  than  the  physicians  of  the 
body?  If  the  progress  of  medical  science 
has  put  out  of  date  the  untrained  midwife  of 
bygone  days,  shall  the  Christian  Church  be 
any  longer  content  to  commit  her  most  deli- 
cate and  difficult  work  to  the  clumsy  hands 
of  the  ignorant  ?     It  is  idle  to  point  to  the 


I96      THE   PSYCHOLOGY  OF  CONVERSION 

successes  of  the  unskilled  practitioner:  the 
most  worthless  patent  medicine  on  the  market 
can  produce  its  little  sheaf  of  testimonials. 
What  we  have  to  remember  is  the  multitude 
who  need,  whom  ignorance  by  its  uncouth 
methods  may  easily  alienate  and  repel,  but 
whose  needs  it  can  never  meet.  We  must 
not,  indeed,  exaggerate  the  worth  of  any 
worker's  power  or  skill.  Whenever  souls 
are  won  there  is  always  another  Agent  at 
work,  besides  the  human  agent ;  and  it  is 
marvellous  to  behold  what  great  things  He 
can  do  even  with  the  most  imperfect  tools. 
The  poor  words  we  speak  with  stammering 
lips  may  be  the  thin  wire  along  which  is 
borne  to  some  receptive  soul  the  very  word 
of  God  Himself.  Yet  these  things  in  no  way 
lessen  our  responsibility  to  bring  our  best 
into  the  service  of  God  and  man ;  and  that 
service  demands  always  not  zeal  only  but 
knowledge  also,  and  not  least  the  knowledge 
of  men.  As  the  physician  studies  the  body, 
and  the  educationalist  the  mind,  each  seeking 
to  perfect  himself  in  the  laws  of  physical  and 
mental  life,  so  must  he  to  whom  is  committed 


THE   PSYCHOLOGY   OF   CONVERSION      197 

the  care  of  souls  give  all  diligence  to  show 
himself  a  workman  that  needeth  not  to  be 
ashamed.  /In  one  word,  we  must  study  the 
patient.  It  is  time  to  put  away  our  crude 
empiricism,  our  clumsy  surgery,  and  to  be  no 
longer  mechanics  only  but  artists./  It  is  your 
business,  John  Wesley  used  to  say  to  his 
helpers,  to  save  as  many  souls  as  you  can  ; 
and  to  that  end,  he  went  on,  you  will  need 
all  the  sense  you  have,  and  to  have  all  your 
wits  about  you.  Only  as  the  Church  hears 
and  obeys  this  message  to-day  can  she  hope 
that  her  words  will  be  for  the  healing  of  the 
nations. 


LECTURE  VI 

PRESENT  DAY  PREACH- 
ING AND  CONVERSION 


LECTURE  VI 

PRESENT  DAY  PREACHING  AND 
CONVERSION 

THE  subjects  of  the  foregoing  lectures 
appeal  to  all  who  love  Jesus  Christ 
and  look  for  the  coming  of  His 
kingdom  among  men.  In  this  closing  lec- 
ture I  speak  more  directly  to  my  brethren  in 
the  ministry.  I  have  no  new  things  to  say 
to  them  ;  I  do  not  pretend  to  have  seen  any- 
thing which  they  have  not  seen,  and  seen 
with  clearer  eyes  than  mine.  Nevertheless, 
I  make  bold  to  speak  to  them,  and  for  this 
reason,  that  among  all  the  books  and  ad- 
dresses on  preaching  which  I  have  read  or 
heard,  I  do  not  remember  one  in  which,  given 
simplicity  and  sincerity  in  the  writer  or 
speaker,  there  was  not  something  that  spoke 
directly  to  my  own  heart.  And,  in  any  case, 
I  could  not  have  undertaken  to  speak  on  the 
subject  of  conversion  at  all,  unless  I  had  also 


202         PREACHING   AND   CONVERSION 

felt  free  to  draw  out  some  of  its  implications 
for  those  who,  like  myself,  are  engaged  in 
the  work  of  preaching  the  gospel.  What 
follows  may  be  wholly  commonplace;  but 
after  all,  the  commonplace  is  the  preacher's 
staple  commodity,  the  vivifying  of  the  com- 
monplace his  great  business.  It  is  for  him  to 
bring  back  the  blood  to  those  poor  pale 
ghosts  we  call  our  beliefs,  that  they  may  lay 
on  us  warm,  compelling  hands  of  life  and 
power.  The  important  question,  therefore, 
concerning  what  is  urged  in  this  lecture,  is 
not  whether  it  is  new,  but  whether  it  is  vital ; 
if  it  is  not,  it  is  only  so  much  dead  lumber  ; 
if  it  is,  it  may  vitalize. 

I 
First  of  all,  then,  let  us  remind  ourselves 
that  conversion  is  the  great  end  of  preaching. 
"Your  business,"  said  Wesley,  "is  not  to 
preach  so  many  times,  and  to  take  care  of 
this  or  that  society,  but  to  save  as  many 
souls  as  you  can."  This  is  a  great  saying, 
and,  provided  it  be  not  too  narrowly  inter- 
preted, it  is  worthy  of  all  acceptation.     But  all 


PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION         203 

converts  do  not  register  themselves  in  an  in- 
quiry-room at  the  close  of  a  Sunday  evening 
service,  nor  are  the  methods  of  the  revivalist 
the  only  means  by  which  men  may  be  saved. 
Indeed,  in  this  matter,  all  methods  are  wholly 
secondary.  The  first  question  for  the  preacher, 
like  the  first  question  in  the  old  Scottish 
Shorter  Catechism,  is  concerned  wholly  and 
solely  with  "the  chief  end "  :  what  am  I  here 
for  ?  Till  that  is  settled  nothing  is  settled  ; 
when  that  is  settled  other  things  settle  them- 
selves. To  this  end  was  I  born,  and  to  this 
end  came  I  into  the  world,  that  by  all  means  I 
might  save  some — when  that  conviction  burns 
like  a  fire  in  a  man's  soul,  we  may  safely 
leave  him  to  himself  and  to  God.  "  The 
Salvation  of  the  Hearer  the  Motive  of  the 
Preacher  "  is  the  title  of  one  of  Newman's 
famous  sermons,  and  when  that  thought 
guides  the  preacher's  pen  as  he  sits  down  to 
the  preparation  of  his  sermon,  and  moves  his 
lips  as  he  stands  up  to  deliver  it,  he  will  need 
little  instruction  about  methods  :  he  has  seen 
the  true  goal ;  he  will  not  miss  the  way 
thither. 


204         PREACHING   AND   CONVERSION 

We  must  take  care  not  to  confuse  the  real 
question  with  other  questions  superficially 
akin  to  it,  but  essentially  distinct  from  it.  In 
all  great  centres  of  population  throughout  the 
English-speaking  world  to-day  the  Christian 
Churches  are  anxiously  pondering  the  prob- 
lem of  the  non-churchgoing  multitudes 
around  them,  through  whose  indifference  and 
alienation  they  seem  powerless  to  break. 
And  no  one,  with  even  the  smallest  knowl- 
edge of  the  facts,  can  hide  from  himself  either 
the  urgency  or  the  magnitude  of  the  problem. 
After  all,  whatever  our  preaching  may  be,  it 
can  do  nothing  for  those  who  are  not  there 
to  listen  to  it.  Nevertheless,  when  we  have 
got  the  crowd — and  experience  shows  that 
with  a  little  sanctified  ingenuity  and  daring 
the  crowd  can  be  got — the  question  still  re- 
mains :  what  are  we  going  to  do  with  it  ? 
The  great  French  preacher  Ravignan  said 
once  to  Lacordaire,  "  I  hear  that  you  had 
such  a  crowd  at  your  last  sermon  that  the 
people  were  sitting  even  on  the  top  of  the 
confessionals."  "Ah,  perhaps,"  said  the 
other ;  "  but  you  managed  to  make  them  go 


PREACHING   AND   CONVERSION         205 

into  the  confessionals."  There  is  the  supreme 
task  of  the  preacher — not  simply  ±0  attract, 
but  to  convince  and  to  convert.  There  must 
be  hooks  and  stings  in  the  word  so  that  it 
cannot  be  shaken  off.  /The  message  is  not 
meant  to  be  admired  but  to  do  something. 
Men  are  sinners,  and  we  must  summon  them 
to  repentance ;  they  are  prodigals,  and  we 
must  call  them  home  ;  they  are  aliens  and 
we  must  persuade  them  to  put  away  their  en- 
mity and  be  at  peace  with  God :  our  preach- 
ing must  do  these  things./  As  Lacordaire 
would  say,  it  must  get  men  not  merely  into 
the  church  but  into  the  confessional.  It  has 
been  said  of  Spurgeon  that  when  he  preached 
he  always  remembered  that  hearts  might  be 
changed  for  ever  as  the  words  were  uttered. 
Hugh  Price  Hughes,  who,  though  he  did  not 
belong  to  the  same  order  of  preachers  as 
Spurgeon,  was  nevertheless  one  of  the  most 
effective  preachers  who  ever  stood  in  a 
Christian  pulpit,  always  used  to  declare  that 
a  preacher  is,  first  of  all,  neither  an  expositor 
nor  a  teacher,  but  an  advocate :  his  congre- 
gation is  the  jury  from  whom  it  is  his  busi- 


206         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

ness  to  win  an  individual  and  immediate 
verdict  for  Christ.  As  a  complete  theory  of 
the  art  of  preaching  doubtless  this  leaves 
something  to  be  desired.  But  this  at  least 
may  be  said  for  it :  it  keeps  the  end  to  be 
sought  steadily  in  view  ;  it  may  not  always 
choose  the  best  possible  route,  but  it  gets  us 
there.  Now  the  trouble  with  much  modern 
preaching,  to  speak  quite  frankly,  is  that  it  for- 
gets what  it  is  meant  to  do.  It  is  interested  in 
its  own  methods  and  processes  ;  it  prizes  and 
perfects  them  for  their  own  sake  ;  and  so,  while 
it  makes  many  pleasant  excursions,  and  leads 
us  into  many  by-paths  of  delight,  yet,  since 
it  has  forgotten  the  goal,  it  never  arrives. 

A  keen  and  sympathetic  observer  of  the 
religious  life  of  England,  and  himself  a  dis- 
tinguished Free  Churchman,  declared  a  few 
years  ago  that,  so  far  as  his  experience 
went,  evangelical  preachers  in  the  Free 
Churches  had  practically  ceased  to  pray  for 
the  unconverted  or  to  plead  with  them.  We 
have  had  volumes  on  preaching  of  recent 
years  full  of  ripe  wisdom  and  good  counsel, 
but  completely  ignoring  the  problems  of  the 


PREACHING  AND    CONVERSION         207 

evangelist ;  for  anything  they  say  to  the  con- 
trary, a  preacher's  first  and  last  and  only 
business  might  be  with  those  who  have  al- 
ready surrendered  themselves  to  Christ. 
And  who  has  not  heard — nay,  who  among 
us  has  not  at  some  time  or  other  caught  him- 
self making — the  distinction  between  a  "  ser- 
mon "  for  which  no  sweat  of  brain  and  heart 
is  too  great,  and  a  "  simple  evangelistic  ad- 
dress," which,  with  the  help  of  a  few  anec- 
dotes, may  be  put  together  in  half  an  hour? 
A  "simple  evangelistic  address"  indeed! 
As  if  the  simple  evangel  were  not  the 
preacher's  supreme  concern  !  As  if  to  preach 
the  gospel  of  the  love  of  God  in  Jesus  Christ, 
and  so  to  preach  it  that  men  shall  commit 
themselves  to  it,  were  not  a  work  to  task  a 
man's  best  strength  and  drain  his  very  life- 
blood  I  "  We  were  well  pleased  to  impart 
unto  you,"  wrote  St.  Paul,  "  not  the  gospel 
of  God  only,  but  also  our  own  souls : "  l  the 
whole  man,  brain  and  heart,  was  in  and  with 
the  message.  What,  one  wonders,  would 
the  Apostle  have  thought  about  our  "  simple 

1  I  Thess.  2  :  8. 


208         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

evangelistic  addresses  "  ?  It  is  preaching  such 
as  his  which  tells  ;  and  it  tells  because  it  costs. 
Nor  is  it  in  the  pulpit  only  that  we  need 
the  re-discovery  and  full  restoration  of  the 
evangelistic  ideal.  The  whole  Church  has 
need  to  read  again  its  great  commission : 
"Go,  make  disciples  of  all  the  nations." 
The  first  duty — not  the  whole,  but  the  first 
duty — of  the  Church  is  the  duty  of  evangeli- 
zation. Its  chief  end  is,  like  its  Master  and 
Lord,  to  seek  and  to  save  that  which  is  lost ; 
and  however  it  may  excel  as  a  social  club 
or  as  an  ethical  school,  if  it  fails  in  this  it  has 
missed  its  chief  calling.  The  intellect  must 
be  trained,  the  conscience  enlightened,  the 
character  built  up,  and  all  this  is  part  of  the 
Church's  proper  work ;  but  it  is  all  subse- 
quent and  subordinate  to  the  work  of  saving 
the  lost.  "Our  business,"  Hugh  Price 
Hughes  used  to  say,  "  is  not  to  coddle  the 
saints,  but  to  collar  the  sinners."  The  lan- 
guage is  distinctly  uncanonical — unpardon- 
ably  so,  some  may  think — but  the  saying  has 
the  root  of  the  matter  in  it,  none  the  less. 
We  have  no  right  to  underrate  the  impor- 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         209 

tance  of  preaching  to  the  converted  ;  the  com- 
plaint— the  wholly  just  complaint,  I  believe — 
is  that  they  get  so  much  more  than  their 
share.  Let  any  one  look  round  among  our 
Churches  to-day,  and  say  if  everywhere  there 
is  not  a  call  for  a  more  earnest  and  persistent 
endeavour,  the  meaning  of  which  could  not 
be  misunderstood  even  by  the  most  preju- 
diced and  unbelieving,  to  bring  in  "  the  out- 
sider "  ;  and  for  a  ministry  aflame  with  apos- 
tolic zeal  to  save.  "  Christianity,"  says  the 
author  of  Ecce  Homo,  "  would  sacrifice  its 
divinity  if  it  abandoned  its  missionary  char- 
acter and  became  a  mere  educational  institu- 
tion. Surely  this  Article  of  Conversion  is  the 
true  articulus  stantis  aut  cadentis  ecclesice. 
When  the  power  of  reclaiming  the  lost  dies 
out  of  the  Church,  it  ceases  to  be  the  Church. 
It  may  remain  a  useful  institution,  though  it 
is  most  likely  to  become  an  immoral  and 
mischievous  one.  Where  the  power  remains, 
there,  whatever  is  wanting,  it  may  still  be 
said  that  'the  tabernacle  of  God  is  with 
men.'" 

» Ecce  Homo,  Ch.  XXI. 


2IO         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 
II 

The  supreme  work  of  the  preacher  is  the 
work  of  winning  men  for  God  :  this  is  the 
first  article  in  the  preacher's  working  creed. 
And  the  second  is  like  unto  it :  all  men  can 
be  won.  We  must  believe  in  the  recover- 
ability  of  man  at  his  worst.  When  we  de- 
clare, "  Christ  Jesus  came  into  the  world  to 
save  sinners,"  it  must  be  with  no  kind  of  re- 
serves. To  falter  here  will  be  to  find  our 
sword-arm  wither  when  we  are  in  the  hottest 
of  the  fight.  Unless  we  can  be  sure  that  we 
have  a  gospel  for  everybody  we  can  never 
be  sure  that  we  have  a  gospel  for  anybody. 

Now,  this  is  a  faith  which,  if  it  is  to  be 
kept,  will  have  to  be  fought  for.  There  is  a 
drift  of  thought,  and  a  still  stronger  drift  of 
fact,  which  make  steadily  against  it.  The 
undoubted  truths  of  heredity  are  being  em- 
phasized and  magnified,  to  the  exclusion  of 
almost  all  other  truths.  Doctrines  of  man 
and  of  man's  responsibility  are  in  the  air  and 
in  our  current  literature  which,  if  we  receive 
them,  mean  the  drugging  and  stupefying  of 
the  soul.  /It  is  not  the  reality  of  sin  men 


PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION         211 

doubt  to-day  so  much  as  its  remedy^  When 
we  find  a  writer  like  Mr.  John  Morley  gravely 
rebuking  Emerson  because  he  makes  so  little 
of  "  that  horrid  burden  and  impediment  on 
the  soul  which  the  Churches  call  sin,  and 
which,  by  whatever  name  we  call  it,  is  a  very 
real  catastrophe  in  the  moral  nature  of 
man," '  it  has,  perhaps,  almost  ceased  to  be 
necessary  for  Christian  teachers  any  longer 
to  protest  that  what  they  call  sin  is  no  inven- 
tion of  theology  but  one  of  the  most  sternly 
real  facts  of  human  experience.  The  pity  of 
it  is  that  this  deepening  consciousness  of  the 
reality  of  moral  evil  is,  in  so  many  minds, 
tinged  with  despair.  The  grievous  hurt  of 
mankind  none  can  deny;  but  where,  men 
ask,  can  healing  be  found?  The  world  is 
sick,  and  alas  !  its  sickness  is  unto  death. 
The  despair  may  voice  itself  in  the  blunt 
denials  of  agnosticism — "  there  is  no  substi- 
tute for  a  good  heart,  and  no  remedy  for  a 
bad  one," — 2  or  in  the  musical  quatrains  of 
pessimism : 

1  Essay  on  Emerson,  Miscellanies,  Vol.  I. 

*  The  Service  of  Man,  by  J.  Cotter  Morison,  p.  2l6. 


212         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

"  And  that  inverted  Bowl  they  call  the  sky, 
Whereunder  crawling,  coop'd,  we  live  and  die, 

Lift  not  your  hands  to  //  for  help — for  It 
As  impotently  moves  as  you  or  I." 

— in  either  case  it  means  that  there  is  no  gos- 
pel for  the  bad  man.  And  the  edge  of  this 
doctrine  of  despair  sometimes  rests  even  on 
the  Christian  Church,  and  darkens  the  minds 
of  Christian  men.  We  set  limits  to  the 
grace  of  God  both  in  our  own  lives  and  in  the 
lives  of  others.  There  are  our  besetting  sins, 
e.  g.,  our  rough  manners,  our  quick  temper, 
our  sullen  gloom — we  are  sometimes  sorry 
for  them,  but  they  are  too  old  to  be  cured 
now,  we  think;  we  must  put  up  with  them 
as  best  we  can.  And  as  for  the  godless  mul- 
titudes that  swarm  in  our  great  towns  and 
cities — the  thriftless,  the  drunken,  the  un- 
clean— what  else  is  there  to  hope  for  but 
their  gradual  extinction  before  the  onward 
march  of  a  better  social  order  ?  Damned  be- 
fore they  were  born,  their  lives  mortgaged  to 
the  devil  before  the  title  deeds  were  put  into 
their  own  hands — who  can  do  anything  for 
these  ?     So  the  question  is  urged,  and  some- 


PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION         213 

times  faith  is  sorely  put  to  it  to  find  an 
answer.  Yet  an  answer  must  be  found,  and 
found  by  the  preacher,  for  it  is  that  for 
which  and  by  which  he  lives  which  is  at 
stake.  When  men  talk  about  necessary  sins 
or  hopeless  classes,  like  Christian  he  must 
put  his  fingers  in  his  ears  and  flee ;  for  him 
to  make  such  language  his  would  be 
to  surrender  the  very  citadel  of  his  faith, 
and  to  make  the  grace  of  God  of  none 
effect. 

How,  then,  shall  we  keep  our  feet  out  of 
the  fatalistic  net?  It  will  mean  much  for  us 
to  wait  continually  on  the  ministry  of  our 
evangelical  Greathearts,  and  mark  the  sub- 
lime confidence  with  which,  linking  together 
the  depths  and  the  heights,  never  forgetting 
that  it  is  for  the  sake  of  the  depths  that  the 
heights  have  been  revealed,  they  proclaim 
the  whole  gospel  to  all  men.  "  Though  thou 
hast  raked  in  the  very  kennels  of  hell,"  cries 
Spurgeon,  "  yet  if  thou  wilt  come  to  Christ 
and  ask  mercy,  He  will  absolve  thee  from 
all  sin."  And  through  all  the  forty  years  of 
his  unparalleled  apostolate  that  note  of  holy 


214         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

daring  is  never  silent.  Or,  open  Wesley's 
Journals;  almost  any  page  will  do,  for  every 
page  is  "  bordered  with  a  pale  edge  of  fire — 
the  spiritual  passion  of  the  great  apostle's 
soul."  "The  next  day"  [Monday,  Sept.  18, 
1738],  he  writes,  "I  went  to  the  condemned 
felons  in  Newgate  and  offered  them  free 
salvation."  "Full  seldom,"  we  have  been 
told, 

"  Full  seldom  doth  a  man  repent,  or  use 
Both  grace  and  will  to  pick  the  vicious  quitch 
Of  blood  and  custom  wholly  out  of  him, 
And  make  all  clean,  and  plant  himself  afresh." 

But  not  "  full  seldom,"  full  often,  had  Wesley 
seen  divine  grace  and  human  will  join  hands 
and  "  make  all  clean  "  ;  why  then,  should  he 
despair  even  of  condemned  felons  in  a  New- 
gate cell  ? 

But  it  is  to  the  New  Testament  we  turn  to 
take  the  band  from  off  our  heart  and  bid  us 
breathe  free.  In  all  that  wonderful  book 
there  is  nothing  more  wonderful  than  its 
calm  sense  of  power  in  the  presence  of  the 
worst  evils  of  the  world.     It  saw  them  in  all 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         215 

their  dread  might,  and  steadfastly  refused  to 
bow  to  them  ;  on  the  contrary,  it  made  a 
show  of  them  openly  and  triumphed  over 
them  in  Christ.  Its  great  word,  its  one 
theme,  is  salvation ;  and  salvation  means 
healing — healing  for  the  grievous  hurts  of 
sin.  It  is  surely  significant  that  the  first 
mention  of  sin  in  the  New  Testament  is  in  a 
prophecy  of  its  destruction :  "  Thou  shalt 
call  His  name  Jesus ;  for  it  is  He  that  shall 
save  His  people  from  their  sins."  The 
writers  of  the  New  Testament  know  nothing 
either  of  necessary  sins  or  of  hopeless  classes. 
There  is  no  ugly  twist  in  the  soul  which  the 
grace  of  God  cannot  straighten  out ;  there 
are  no  men  and  women  so  far  gone  that  it  is 
vain  to  seek  to  do  anything  for  them.  Christ 
does  not  get  rid  of  "  difficult  cases  "  by  send- 
ing them  to  the  incurable  ward  ;  in  the  great 
hospital  of  ailing  souls  "  Despairing  of  none  1 " 
is  the  motto  alike  of  the  Physician  Himself 
and  of  all  who  serve  under  Him.  The  least 
— the  last — the  lost:  some  one  has  pointed 
out  how  often  these  three  words  were  on  the 
lips  of  Jesus,  and  always  those  of  whom  they 


2l6         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

speak  upon  His  heart.1  What  can  He  do  for 
them  ?  In  one  of  our  English  cathedrals  is  a 
window  which  is  the  cathedral's  chief  glory 
and  pride.  It  was  the  work  of  a  youth,  and 
made,  it  is  said,  from  gathered  pieces  of 
glass  which  the  window  artist  of  the  cathe- 
dral had  rejected.  And  this  is  the  miracle 
of  Jesus ;  this  is  what  He  does  with  the 
world's  poor  leavings  :  He  makes  the  least 
to  be  greatest,  and  the  last  to  be  first,  and  the 
lost  to  be  found.  We  preach,  admonishing 
every  man  and  teaching  every  man  in  all  wis- 
dom, that  we  may  present  every  man  perfect 
in  Christ. 

Ill 

That  men  can  be  won,  that  the  work  of 
preaching  is  the  work  of  winning  men : 
these  are  the  first  principles  of  the  preacher's 
faith.  But  once  again  it  must  be  insisted 
that  identity  of  aim  does  not  necessarily  in- 
volve identity  of  method.  We  must  expect 
to  find  men,  as  loyal  as  ourselves  to  the  su- 

1 1  owe  this  reference  and  the  illustration  which  follows  to  a 
sermon  preached  in  Edinburgh  some  years  ago  by  Rev.  C.  S. 
Home. 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         217 

preme  ends  of  the  Christian  ministry,  who 
yet  doubt  the  expediency,  or  even  the  legiti- 
macy, of  methods  of  work  which  we  adopt 
without  hesitation.  No  unprejudiced  ob- 
server will  question  the  part,  the  really  serv- 
iceable part,  that  revivals  have  played  in  the 
past  history  of  the  Church.  Nor  is  there  any 
good  reason  to  suppose  that  the  day  of  the 
revival  is  over.  A  distinguished  American 
professor  published  a  few  years  ago  a  very 
interesting  volume  in  which  he  spoke  of  re- 
vivalism as  though  it  were  a  spent  wave. 
"The  strength  of  the  old-time  revival  lay 
largely  in  the  forces  of  which  social  psychol- 
ogy takes  cognizance.  It  moved  men  in 
masses,  stirring  a  whole  congregation,  a 
whole  city,  a  whole  state  at  once."  Nothing 
of  that  kind  happens  now,  he  said  :  the  re- 
vival and  with  it  the  revival  type  of  conver- 
sion are  perceptibly  on  the  wane.1  The  ink 
on  the  printed  page  was  scarcely  dry  when 
the  great  Revival  broke  out  in  Wales;  so 
little  can  even  the  wisest  among  us  forecast 
through  what  channels  the  life-giving  waters 

1  Coe's  Religion  of  a  Mature  Mind,  p.  264. 


218         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

will  pour  themselves.  That  revivals  in  the 
future  will  have  their  own  distinguishing 
characteristics,  and  that  these  will  not  simply 
reproduce  the  characteristics  of  past  revivals, 
is  only  what  history  and  experience  would 
lead  us  to  expect.  With  no  less  confidence 
may  we  anticipate  that  so  long  as  human  na- 
ture remains  what  it  is,  so  long  will  there  be 
those  who  can  most  effectively  aid  their  fel- 
lows through  the  special  agency  of  a  revival, 
so  long  will  there  be  those  for  whom  the  day 
of  revival  will  be  the  day  of  their  visitation 
from  on  high.  These  things  are  manifest ; 
to  refuse  to  see  and  say  them  is  to  show  one- 
self wilfully  blind  to  the  Spirit's  work  among 
men.  But  not  less  plainly  must  it  be  said 
that  these  are  not  the  only  signs  of  His  pres- 
ence. Only  a  small  minority  of  the  dis- 
ciples of  Christ,  it  has  been  said,  have  entered 
upon  the  Christian,  life  through  the  door  of 
revival  agencies.1  We  need  concern  our- 
selves about  no  arithmetical  proportion  in  ad- 
mitting in  general  the  truth  of  the  claim 
which    lies  behind  statements  of  this  kind. 

1  Coe's  Religion  of  a  Mature  Mind,  p.  262. 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         2IQ 

The  fact  to  be  recognized  is  the  existence  of 
multitudes  to  whom  all  our  "  special  services  " 
and  huge  "  evangelistic  campaigns,"  no  mat- 
ter how  carefully  they  may  be  organized,  or 
how  enthusiastically  they  may  be  carried 
through,  are  nothing  and  less  than  nothing. 
We  have  done  great  things  by  these  means 
in  the  past,  and  we  shall  do  great  things  by 
them  again  in  the  future,  but  if  we  imagine 
that  in  them  lies  the  solution  of  the  whole 
problem  of  evangelization  we  are  living  in  a 
fool's  paradise.*^ 

As  these  lines  were  being  written,  two  kin- 
dred statements  from  opposite  sides  of  the 
Atlantic  came  together  into  my  hands.  "  In 
all  lines  of  attempts  to  stir  public  interest," 
says  the  President  of  an  American  College, 
"  there  is  a  growing  feeling  that  the  immense 
convention  has  been  rather  overdone.  The 
aim  now  is,  rather,  thoroughly  to  enlist  a 
much  smaller  number  of  strong  thoughtful 
men  and  work  out  upon  the  community 
through  them."  An  experienced  English 
journalist  and  politician  reads  the  situation 
at  home  in  precisely  the  same  way.     How, 


220         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

he  asks,  must  the  supporters  of  a  fiercely 
controversial  measure,  at  this  moment  before 
the  House  of  Commons,  secure  victory  for 
their  cause  ?  Not,  he  says,  by  passing  reso- 
lutions, or  making  speeches  to  huge  and  al- 
ready convinced  audiences,  but  "by  small 
meetings  in  the  open  air,  or  by  talking  to  in- 
dividuals or  small  groups  of  twos  and  threes." 
This  is  the  method  of  Christian  work  for 
which  Henry  Drummond  so  earnestly  pleaded. 
We  must  recover  our  faith  in  the  individual  ; 
the  art  of  dealing  with  him  must  be  re-learned. 
11  Every  atom  in  the  universe  can  act  on 
every  other  atom,  but  only  through  the  atom 
next  it."  Jesus  findeth  Philip.  What  is  the 
next  thing  we  read  about  Philip?  Philip 
findeth  Nathaniel  It  was  so  at  the  begin- 
ning ;  it  must  be  so  again  ;  it  must  be  so  al- 
ways, if  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  ever  to 
prevail. 

In  all  these  matters  Christian  men  must 
cultivate  a  wise  tolerance.  It  is  not  neces- 
sary that  we  adopt  each  other's  methods  ;  it 
is  necessary  that  we  do  not  judge  each 
other.     The  scorn  of  other  men's  labours  into 


PREACHING   AND   CONVERSION         221 

which  we  sometimes  suffer  ourselves  to  be 
betrayed  is  a  sin  against  the  gospel  which  we 
preach.  It  is  time  for  the  pastor  and  the 
evangelist  to  understand  and  appreciate  each 
other.  The  old  taunts  of  "  Sensation  !  "  on 
the  one  side,  and  "  Stagnation  1 "  on  the  other, 
must  be  buried  forever.  We  are  all  called 
by  all  means  to  save  some.  "  Means  "  which 
do  really  "  save  "  need  no  other  justification ; 
they  may  not  be  such  as  we  can  use ;  but 
they  may  save  some  whom  our  means  will 
never  reach  ;  and  therein  let  us  rejoice. 

IV 

All  things  to  all  men  :  but  this  is  by  no 
means  the  only  apostolic  word  for  the  guid- 
ance of  the  preacher  in  his  work  of  winning 
men;  "It  pleased  God,"  St.  Paul  says,  "by 
the  foolishness  of  preaching  to  save  them 
that  believe."  l  I  quote  the  words  in  the  fa- 
miliar but  misleading  rendering  of  the  Au- 
thorized Version.  The  Revised  Version  has 
"  the  foolishness  of  the  preaching," — a  trans- 
lation   which    may    put   us   on   our   guard 

1  I  Cor.  I  :  21. 


222         PREACHING   AND   CONVERSION 

against  the  misconception  of  the  earlier  ren- 
dering, but  which  is  not,  it  is  to  be  feared,  very 
intelligible  in  itself.  Yet  the  Apostle's  words 
are  wholly  without  ambiguity,  however  diffi- 
cult they  may  be  to  translate  without  the  aid 
of  a  paraphrase:  "  It  pleased  God,"  he  says, 
"  by  the  folly  (as  the  wise  world  calls  it)  of 
the  message  proclaimed,1  to  save  them  that 
believe."  In  other  words,  men  are  to  be 
saved  by  the  word  of  the  gospel,  by  the 
preaching  of  Christ— His  life  and  His  death, 
all  that  He  was  and  all  that  He  is.  To  be 
saved  and  to  come  to  the  knowledge  of  the 
truth  are,  for  St.  Paul,  only  different  ways  of 
saying  the  same  thing. 

Statements  such  as  these,  then,  define  and 
limit  the  kind  of  truth  with  which  the  preacher 
has  to  do.  Truth  is  of  various  kinds — mathe- 
matical, scientific,  economic;  but  the  truth 
with  which  he  is  concerned  is  saving  truth,  the 
truth  of  the  gospel,  truth  "  as  truth  is  in  Jesus." 
"  I  long  to  see  you,"  Paul  told  the  Romans, 

1  ftrfpuyfid  which  means  not  the  act  of  preaching  (xTJpu£i?) 
but  the  message  proclaimed.  See  Findlay  on  I  Corinthians  in 
The  Expositor's  Greek  Testament, 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         223 

"  that  I  may  impart  unto  you  some  spiritual 
gift."  1  I  do  not  suggest  that  this  is  a  com- 
plete definition  of  the  aims  of  the  Christian 
ministry  ;  I  would  be  the  last  to  seek  to  rule 
out  everything  that  does  not  come  within  the 
four  walls  of  a  single  text.  Nevertheless,  if 
we  acknowledge  the  authority  of  the  New 
Testament  at  all,  we  must  admit  that  the 
teaching  of  saving  truth,  the  imparting  of 
spiritual  gifts,  is  the  great  end  of  preaching. 
11  Thou  art  a  minister  of  the  Word,"  wrote 
William  Perkins  beside  his  name  on  all  his 
books,  "  mind  thy  business."  2 

Are  we  preachers  to-day  minding  our 
business  ?  We  are  doing  many  things  ;  are 
we  doing,  as  we  might  and  as  we  ought,  the 
one  thing  for  the  sake  of  which  we  are  what 
we  are  and  where  we  are  ?  It  is  not,  I  hope, 
an  uncharitable  thing  to  say,  that,  speaking 
generally,  the  preacher  who  can  do  anything 
else  better  than  he  can  preach  is  in  his  wrong 
place  ;  he  ought  to  be  doing  that  other  thing 

1  Romans  I :  II. 

3  For  a  brief  account  of  this  Puritan  divine,  see  Dr.  John 
Brown's  Puritan  Preaching  in  England,  pp.  7 1-83. 


224         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

which  he  can  do  better.  One  of  our  English 
religious  newspapers,  a  short  time  ago,  had 
the  following  reference  to  a  minister  who  had 

just  been  settled  in  a  new  charge  :  "  Mr. 

is  one  of  the  best  political  speakers  in  Eng- 
land .  .  .  but  he  is  also  an  excellent 
preacher,  and  his  ministry  at prom- 
ises to  be  very  helpful  and  influential." 
The  intention  of  the  writer  was  obvious ;  but 
a  more  left-handed  kind  of  compliment  it 
would  be  difficult  to  conceive.  It  reminds 
one  of  Gibbon's  account  of  the  Emperor 
Gallienus :  "He  was  a  master  of  several 
curious  but  useless  sciences,  a  ready  orator, 
an  elegant  poet,  a  skilful  gardener,  an  excel- 
lent cook,  and  a  most  contemptible  prince."  1 
But  men  such  as  these,  who  win  the  first 
prizes  in  other  men's  departments  and  are 
only  third-rate  men  in  their  own,  be  they 
preachers  or  princes,  have  plainly  missed 
their  way.  And,  perhaps,  there  is  no  one 
whom  we  may  more  justly  pity  than  the 
minister  of  the  gospel  who  is  famous  for  his 
schemes  or  his  books  or  his  politics  or  for 

*  Decline  and  Fall,  Ch.  X. 


PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION         225 

anything  that  is  his,  but  in  whose  ministry 
the  hungry  can  find  no  food,  and  the  sorrow- 
ing no  comfort. 

Look  at  the  question  from  another  point 
of  view.  Can  any  one  glance  over  the 
Church  advertisement  sin  the  Press  of  any  of 
our  great  cities  to-day,  without  feeling  that 
the  Apostle's  principle  of  "  all  things  to  all 
men"  is  being  strained  to  the  breaking 
point  ?  We  can  all  understand  and  sympa- 
thize with  the  motives  which  lie  behind  these 
things.  Earnest  men  feel  that  they  must  do 
something,  that  indeed  they  ought  to  do 
anything,  that  will  sting  and  startle  the  mul- 
titudes out  of  their  indifference.  But  in  our 
eagerness  to  get  a  hearing  for  the  gospel,  let 
us  not  forget  that  it  is  the  gospel  for  which  a 
hearing  is  to  be  got.  Newspaper  topics, 
questions  of  the  hour,  and  such  like,  may  on 
occasion  serve  some  useful  end  ;  they  may 
help,  like  the  ringing  of  a  bell,  to  gather  the 
crowd ;  but  there  is  nothing  that  people  tire 
of  much  sooner  than  the  sound  of  a  bell,  and 
unless  the  bellman  has  something  to  say,  the 
crowd  will  soon  scatter  again.     "  Our  preach- 


226         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

ers,"  wrote  Dr.  Tholuck  once  from  Germany 
to  Dr.  Pusey,  "  having  got  rid  of  the  Chris- 
tian doctrines,  are  now  insisting  with  much 
earnestness  upon  the  importance  of  taking 
regular  exercise."1  From  very  different 
motives  some  among  us  are  repeating  to-day 
the  same  tragic  blunder.  But  does  any  sane 
man  seriously  suppose  that  barren  futilities 
of  this  kind  can  avail  us  aught  ?  It  is  7iotfit 
that  we  should  forsake  the  word  of  God  and 
serve  tables.  Every  one  will  remember  John 
Ruskin's  magnificent  protest  against  the 
folly  of  the  wasted  hours  we  spend  rummag- 
ing in  the  waste  paper  basket  of  literature, 
while  the  world's  great  masterpieces  lie  un- 
opened :  "  Will  you  go  and  gossip  with  your 
housemaid  or  your  stable  boy  when  you  may 
talk  with  queens  and  kings  ;  or  flatter  your- 
self that  it  is  with  any  worthy  consciousness 
of  your  own  claims  to  respect  that  you  jostle 
with  the  hungry  and  common  crowd  for 
entree  here,  and  audience  there,  while  all  the 
while  this  eternal  court  is  open  to  you,  with 
its  society,  wide  as  the  world,  multitudinous 

1  Quoted  in  Liddon's  Some  Elements  of  Religion,  p.  23. 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         227 

as  its  days,  the  chosen,  and  the  mighty  of 
every  place  and  time?"1  And  shall  we 
who  are  the  ambassadors  of  Christ,  whose 
high  prerogative  it  is  to  speak  to  men  of 
Him — the  Incarnate  Son,  the  Revealer  of  the 
Father,  the  Saviour  of  men — of  life  and 
death,  of  the  soul  and  eternity,  shall  we  turn 
aside  to  find  our  texts  in  the  newspapers  and 
to  make  our  pulpit  a  sounding-board  for  the 
voices  of  the  market-place  and  the  street? 
Verily,  not  for  these  things  was  committed 
unto  us  the  word  of  reconciliation. 

And  even  from  the  point  of  view  of  gain- 
ing the  ear  of  the  crowd,  it  may  turn  out 
that  some  of  our  attempted  short-cuts  are 
really  a  longer  way  round  than  the  old 
paths.  I  know  nothing  to  give  a  man  pause 
in  this  matter  like  a  study  of  John  Wesley's 
texts  as  these  are  recorded  in  his  Journals. 
The  common  people  of  England  in  the 
eighteenth  century  were  ignorant  and  brutal 
to  a  degree  of  which  to-day  happily  we  have 
little  experience.  Yet  from  among  these 
very  people,  speaking  to  them  on  subjects 

1  Sesame  and  Lilies. 


228         PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION 

which  led  straight  to  the  very  heart  of  the 
Christian  gospel,  Wesley  gathered  in  the 
open  air,  during  a  ministry  of  over  fifty 
years,  crowds  such  as  perhaps  have  never 
waited  on  the  words  of  any  speaker.  To  do 
the  work  of  an  evangelist  Wesley  knew  that  it 
is  more  important  to  have  a  great  theme 
than  a  novel  theme.  Do  not  the  greatest  and 
most  fruitful  ministries  of  our  own  time  point 
the  same  lesson?  Spurgeon  in  London, 
Alexander  Maclaren  in  Manchester,  Alex- 
ander Whyte  in  Edinburgh — to  name  but 
three  examples — all  bear  witness  to  the  power 
of  a  ministry  which  is  built  on  the  word  of 
God  to  win  and  hold  the  ear  of  the  multi- 
tude. "  Sir,  we  would  see  Jesus : "  this  is 
still  the  demand  which  they  who  come  up  to 
worship  make  of  the  Lord's  apostles ;  if  we 
cannot  meet  it  the  one  reason  for  our  apos- 
tleship  is  gone  ;  we  have  torn  up  our  charter, 
we  have  forfeited  our  right  to  be.  We  may 
still  go  on  discussing  questions  of  the  hour 
and  feeding  the  souls  of  the  hungry  with 
little  half-baked  expositions  of  great  social 
problems,  but  our  work  will  be  done,  and  it 


PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION         229 

will  not  be  long  before  the  savourless  salt 
cast  forth  of  God  is  trodden  under  foot  of 
men. 


One  other  thing  still  is  needful  that  our 
word  may  be  made  mighty  to  the  winning  of 
men  for  God.  In  all  true  preaching,  Phillips 
Brooks  has  told  us,1  there  are  two  essential 
elements — truth  and  personality ;  if  either  of 
these  be  wanting,  what  remains  is  not 
preaching.  We  were  well  pleased  to  impart 
unto  you,  not  the  gospel  of  God  only,  but  also 
our  own  souls ;  this  is  what  preaching  meant 
to  St.  Paul ;  it  must  not  mean  less  to  us.  Of 
the  nature  of  the  truth  given  to  us  to  speak 
something  has  already  been  said  ;  let  my  last 
word  be  concerning  the  preacher  himself. 

And  what  I  would  urge  is  that  we  should 
press  into  this  holy  service  every  gift  of  mind 
and  of  heart  with  which  God  has  enriched 
us.  It  is  the  tragedy  of  so  many  lives  that 
their  daily  calling  makes  no  demand  on  the 
soul's  best  powers ;    if  these  are  not  to  fust 

1  Lectures  on  Preaching,  p.  5. 


230         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

in  them  unused,  other  claims  must  intervene. 
But  there  is  nothing  that  the  preacher  has  or 
is  that  in  his  preaching  he  may  not  turn  to 
account.  Physical  gifts,  intellectual  gifts, 
gifts  of  speech,  the  magnetism  that  draws 
men,  the  strength  that  moulds  them — he  may 
harness  them  all  to  the  work  of  his  life; 
they  may  all  be  his  allies  and  helpers  when 
he  stands  before  men  to  speak  to  them  of 
God. 

The  day  has  happily  gone  by — the  wonder 
is  that  it  ever  should  have  been  at  all — when 
it  is  any  longer  necessary  to  insist  that  for 
the  best  work  of  an  evangelist  there  must  be 
the  trained  mind  as  well  as  the  warmed 
heart.1     But  are  there  not  other  gifts  besides 

1  It  is  a  pleasure,  in  this  connection,  to  recall  Henry  Drum- 
mond's  tribute  to  his  friend  Moody.  In  Whittier's  Life  there 
is  the  following  reference  to  the  great  evangelist :  "  Moody  and 
Sankey  are  busy  in  Boston.  The  papers  give  the  discourses  of 
Mr.  Moody  which  seem  rather  commonplace  and  poor,  but  the 
man  is  in  earnest.  ...  I  hope  he  will  do  good,  and  be- 
lieve that  he  will  reach  and  move  some  that  could  not  be 
touched  by  James  Freeman  Clarke  or  Phillips  Brooks.  I  can- 
not accept  his  theology  or  part  of  it  at  least,  and  his  methods 
are  not  to  my  taste.  But  if  he  can  make  the  drunkard,  the 
gambler  and  the  debauchee  into  decent  men,  and  make  the  lot 
of  their  weariful  wives  and  children  less  bitter,  I  bid  "him  God- 
speed."     These  words,  wrote  Drummond,  "  are  broad,  large- 


PREACHING   AND  CONVERSION         23 1 

those  of  the  intellect  concerning  the  use  of 
which  in  religious  work  some  of  us  are  still 
unreasonably  shy  ?  Two  examples  will  illus- 
trate my  meaning.  I  remember  speaking 
once  with  a  Professor  of  the  United  Free 
Church  of  Scotland — a  man  of  sane  and  well- 
balanced  judgment — about  Henry  Drum- 
mond  and  his  remarkable  work  among  the 
Edinburgh  students,  "  Drummond,"  he  said, 
11  simply  charmed  men  into  the  Kingdom. 
When  he  spoke  he  cast  such  a  spell  about 
some  that  for  the  time  they  seemed  half- 
dazed  ;  when  they  recovered  it  was  to  find 
themselves  within  the   Kingdom.     But,"  he 

hearted,  even  kind.  But  they  are  not  the  right  words.  They 
are  the  stereotyped  charities  which  sweet  natures  apply  to  any- 
thing not  absolutely  harmful  and  contain  no  more  impression  of 
the  tremendous  intellectual  and  moral  force  of  the  man  behind 
than  if  the  reference  were  to  the  obscurest  Salvation  Army  zea- 
lot. I  shall  not  endorse,  for  it  could  only  give  offence,  the  re- 
mark of  a  certain  author  of  world-wide  repute  when  he  read 
the  words :  •  Moody !  why,  he  could  have  put  half  a  dozen 
Whittiers  in  his  pocket,  and  they  would  never  have  been 
noticed ; '  but  I  shall  endorse,  and  with  hearty  goodwill,  a 
judgment  which  he  further  added.  « I  have  always  held,'  he 
said, — and  he  is  a  man  who  has  met  every  great  contemporary 
thinker  from  Carlyle  downward— '  that  in  sheer  brain-size,  in 
the  mere  raw  material  of  intellect,  Moody  stands  among  the 
first  three  or  four  great  men  I  have  ever  known.' " 


232         PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION 

added  seriously,  "there  was  no  mistake 
about  it ;  they  were  there  / "  There  is  of 
course  a  touch  of  purposeful  exaggeration 
in  the  description  which  will  deceive  nobody, 
but  it  does  undoubtedly  point  to  one  secret, 
on  the  human  side,  of  Drummond's  marvel- 
lous success  as  an  evangelist.  My  second 
example  is  the  late  Hugh  Price  Hughes. 
Mr.  Hughes  possessed  in  an  extraordinary 
degree  that  quality  of  masterfulness,  that 
power  to  impose  one's  own  will  on  others, 
which  always  marks  out  the  born  leader  of 
men.  I  have  seen  him,  almost  by  the  sheer 
might  of  his  own  right  arm,  bring  a  hostile 
assembly  clean  round  to  his  own  way  of 
thinking.  And  when  he  preached  he  drew 
without  stint  on  this  great  power  of  moulding 
men.  Are  we  to  conclude,  then,  as  men 
sometimes  did,  that  the  visible  results  which 
followed  his  evangelistic  appeals  were  simply 
another  example  of  the  way  in  which  his  im- 
perious personality  dominated  wills  weaker 
than  his  own  ?  I  do  not  see  that,  either  in 
the  case  of  Drummond  or  of  Hughes,  we  are 
shut    up    to  any  such   conclusion.     If    the 


PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION         233 

Spirit  of  God  could  come  upon,  or  (as  the 
literal  meaning  is)  could  "  clothe  itself  with  " 
a  Gideon  or  a  Zechariah,1  with  the  "  much 
learning"  of  a  Paul  or  the  eloquence  of  an 
Apollos,  why  not  also  with  the  magnetism  of 
a  Drummond,  or  the  masterfulness  of  a 
Hughes?  That  in  all  such  cases  there  is 
danger  lest  the  work  should  be  of  man  rather 
than  of  God,  and  so  should  come  to  nought,  is 
true ;  but  the  danger  is  always  there  when- 
ever God  works  through  men.  In  no  case 
does  the  reality  of  a  conversion  depend  on 
the  nature  of  the  human  agency  by  which  it 
is  effected ;  that  can  be  determined  only  by 
the  fruits  which  follow.  Apply  this  test  to 
the  work  of  men  like  Drummond  or  Hughes, 
and  the  serviceableness  of  their  own  peculiar 
gifts  needs  no  demonstration.  For  ourselves 
the  lesson  is  plain:  we  must  lay  in  God's 
hand  all  that  is  ours,  for  who  can  tell  with 
what  unworthy  human  powers  the  divine 
Spirit  may  elect  to  clothe  itself  ? 

But,  above    all,   for  the  work  of  winning 
men  we   need  a  re-birth  of  spiritual  passion. 

lSee  Judges  6 :  34  ;  2  Chron.  24  :  20  (R.  V.  raarg.). 


234         PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION 

Some  one  has  pointed  out  the  striking  con- 
trast between  the  dominant  interest  with 
which  St.  Paul  says  "  I  must  see  Rome," 
and  that  which  the  words  would  ordinarily 
reveal.  The  Apostle  was  eager  to  visit  the 
imperial  city  only  because  he  was  eager  to 
preach  there  also  the  gospel  of  Christ.  Every 
other  ambition  of  his  life  had  passed  into 
this.  All  the  waters  of  his  soul  had  gathered 
themselves  into  one  mighty  flood  to  be 
poured  through  the  narrows  of  this  single  pur- 
pose :  "To  preach  unto  the  Gentiles  the  un- 
searchable riches  of  Christ."  The  urgency  of 
his  message  burned  like  a  fire  in  his  bones ;  his 
passion  to  win  men  was  the  divine  constraint 
which  gave  him  no  rest.  "  By  the  space  of 
three  years,"  he  told  the  Ephesian  elders,  "  I 
ceased  not  to  admonish  every  one  night  and 
day  with  tears."  When  his  friends,  foresee- 
ing danger  and  death,  besought  him  not  to 
go  up  to  Jerusalem,  "  What  do  ye,"  he  said, 
11  weeping  and  breaking  my  heart  ?  for  I 
am  ready  not  to  be  bound  only  but  also 
to  die  at  Jerusalem  for  the  name  of  the  Lord 
Jesus."     And  above  all,  when  he  thought  of 


PREACHING  AND   CONVERSION         235 

his  brethren,  his  kinsmen  after  the  flesh,  his 
heart's  desire  and  supplication  to  God  for 
them  was  that  they  might  be  saved  ;  nay,  he 
was  even  ready  for  their  sakes  to  wish  him- 
self anathema  from  Christ.1 

There  is  something  in  a  passion  like  this 
which  subdues  and  awes  us  ;  and  is  this  not 
the  very  heart  of  preaching?  "The  voice 
said,  Cry."  Men  do  not  listen  because  we  do 
not  cry ;  we  are  ineffectual  because  we  are 
cold  ;  we  do  not  move  because  we  are  not 
greatly  moved.  "  We  may  not  have  lost 
the  message  and  yet  we  may  have  lost 
the  right  way  of  delivering  it.  It  would  be 
possible  so  to  read  or  to  speak  even  a  great 
or  true  doctrine  that  not  a  soul  would  believe 
a  word  you  said.  The  first  business  is  the 
Cry.  No  man  goes  about  the  streets  whis- 
pering •  Fire  !  Fire  !  Fire  1 '  he  would  be 
passed  by  with  a  smile  as  an  innocent  luna- 
tic." Surely  of  all  vain  and  helpless  things 
in  this  sublunary  world  the  take-it-or-leave-it 
kind  of  preaching — the  preaching  that  does 

1  This  paragraph  is  borrowed  from  my  Memoranda  Paulina, 
P-  IS4- 


236         PREACHING  AND  CONVERSION 

not  urge  and  press  its  message  upon  men — 
can  have  the  least  to  say  for  itself.  We  are 
not  lecturers,  seeking  to  please  or  instruct  ; 
we  are  preachers,  whose  business  is  to  con- 
vince and  persuade ;  and  we  cannot  afford, 
when  we  ought  to  be  girding  ourselves  for  a 
resolute  grapple  with  the  conscience  and  the 
will,  to  let  the  sermon  dribble  out  in  a  neat 
epigram  or  an  eloquent  peroration.  The  pic- 
ture which  Christian  saw  in  the  Interpreter's 
house  should  hang  on  the  walls  of  every 
preacher's  study  ;  and  this  was  the  fashion 
of  it :  "It  had  eyes  uplift  to  Heaven,  the  best 
of  Books  in  his  hand,  the  law  of  truth  was 
written  upon  his  lips,  the  world  was  behind 
his  back  ;  it  stood  as  if  it  pleaded  with  men, 
and  a  crown  of  gold  did  hang  over  its  head." 
It  stood  as  if  it  pleaded  with  men  ;  and  the  1 
Church's  great  revival  will  come  when  on  the 
lips  of  all  her  ministers  is  heard  once  more 
the  great  apostolic  note  of  appeal,  We  be- 
seech you  on  behalf  of  Christ%  be  ye  reconciled 
to  God. 


&MMMM 


Date  Due 


y^-5^ 


